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16 April 21
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Paul Manafort's Lawyers Appear to Accidentally Blow the Door Open on Collusion
ALSO SEE: Paul Manafort Was 'a Grave Counterintelligence Threat,'
Republican-Led Senate Panel Finds
Andy Kroll and Ryan Bort, Rolling Stone
Excerpt: "President Trump's disgraced former campaign chief lied about sharing polling data with someone connected to the Russian government."
he legal saga of Paul Manafort took yet another twist on Tuesday.
Lawyers for Trump’s disgraced former campaign chairman, who was convicted of tax and bank fraud last year, submitted a filing in Washington, D.C., federal court responding to Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s assertion that Manafort had lied to Mueller’s office and so violated his plea agreement. Manafort’s lawyers pushed back on that claim by saying that he had extensively cooperated with Mueller, meeting with the government lawyers and investigators a dozen times and twice testifying before a grand jury.
But Manafort’s team screwed up.
They tried to redact four different passages in their filing, but failed to do so properly, leaving the redacted text in plain sight. For instance, Manafort’s lawyers responded to Mueller’s allegation that Manafort lied to the government about his interactions with a man named Konstantin Kilimnik, who was Manafort’s right-hand man during his time as a powerful political consultant in Ukraine. What’s more noteworthy is that Kilimnik has alleged connections to Russian intelligence.
What the redacted text says is that Manafort allegedly misled Mueller about meeting with Kilimnik during the 2016 presidential campaign and discussing a “Ukraine peace plan” with Kilimnik “on more than one occasion.” Another improperly redacted section revealed that Mueller has alleged that Manafort “lied about sharing polling data with Mr. Kilimnik related to the 2016 presidential campaign.” The remaining redactions detail rebuttals from Manafort’s lawyers to two other alleged instances of misleading statements made by Manafort, including one about Manafort allegedly contacting President Trump in May 2018.
After journalists revealed the improper redactions, Manafort’s lawyers refiled the document with the redactions fixed.
Meanwhile, Natalya Veselnitskaya, the Russian lawyer who, along with others, met with Donald Trump, Jr., in Trump Tower prior to the 2016 election, has been charged with obstruction of justice by federal prosecutors. The charges stem from a money laundering case involving a Cyprus investment firm owned by a wealthy Russian businessman, one of Veselnitskaya’s clients. Prosecutors allege that Veselnitskaya secretly worked with the Russian government to draft an “intentionally misleading” statement clearing the company of any wrongdoing.
The case, which the Justice Department launched in 2013, is unrelated to Trump or the 2016 election, but the new indictment highlights Veselnitskaya’s close ties with the Kremlin, increasing the likelihood that she was working working hand-in-glove with the Russian government when she met with Trump, Jr., in 2016. The meeting was brokered by music publicist Ron Goldstone, who promised Trump, Jr,. in an email that Veselnitskaya, referred to as a “Russian government attorney,” possessed damaging information about Hillary Clinton. Before the emails between Goldstone and Trump Jr. were released, Veselnitskaya claimed that she was attending the meeting in a private capacity.
In other words, it hasn’t been a good day for the “NO COLLUSION!” contingent.
The scene of the shooting on Thursday night in Indianapolis. (photo: WXIN)
ALSO SEE: Man Shot, Killed by Police After Opening Fire
at San Antonio Airport
At Least 8 People Killed in Shooting at Indianapolis FedEx Facility; Suspect Also Dead
Phil Helsel, Kurt Chirbas and Elisha Fieldstadt, NBC News
Excerpt: "At least eight people were killed after a gunman opened fire at a FedEx facility in Indianapolis late Thursday."
The suspected gunman in the shooting killed himself, police said.
Multiple other people were taken to hospitals with injuries, police said.
The shooting was reported shortly after 11 p.m. and officers arrived to an active shooter incident, Indianapolis Metropolitan Police Department spokeswoman Officer Genae Cook told reporters.
She said the gunman killed himself at the scene. Authorities found eight bodies during a search, she added.
That number did not include the gunman.
Cook said it was too early to tell if the shooter was an employee of the facility, and that an investigation was underway. A motive was also unclear.
"This is a tragedy," Cook said.
Five people were taken to hospitals, including one person in critical condition, according to police. Two others were treated at the scene, the department said Friday morning in a statement.
But there were also people who went or who were taken to hospitals privately, Cook said, and police were gathering information. No law enforcement officers were hurt, she added.
A FedEx employee told NBC's "TODAY" show that he was sitting outside the building when he heard what he initially thought was a car with engine problems. He soon realized the sound was actually gunfire.
"And when I stand up, I see a man — a hooded figure — I was unable to see his face in detail however," Levi Miller said.
He said the man had a rifle "and he started shouting, and then he started firing in random directions." He couldn't tell what the gunman was yelling. "I thought he saw me and so I immediately ducked for cover," Miller said.
Family members were waiting at a nearby Holiday Inn Express hotel early Friday to hear if their loved ones were safe while police chaplains provided support, WTHR photojournalist Joe Fenton tweeted.
In a statement, FedEx said: "We are deeply shocked and saddened by the loss of our team members following the tragic shooting at our FedEx Ground facility in Indianapolis. Our most heartfelt sympathies are with all those affected by this senseless act of violence. The safety of our team members is our top priority, and we are fully cooperating with investigating authorities."
Indianapolis Mayor Joe Hogsett offered prayers to "the families of those whose lives were cut short" and thanked the "city’s first responders for their tireless work overnight."
"Their quick response provided critical aid to those injured in the shooting and brought a measure of calm to an otherwise chaotic scene," he said in a tweet.
Indiana Gov. Eric Holcomb ordered flags to be flown at half-staff.
"This is another heartbreaking day and I’m shaken by the mass shooting at the FedEx Ground facility in Indianapolis," he said in a statement. "In times like this, words like justice and sorrow fall short in response for those senselessly taken. Our thoughts are with the families, friends, coworkers and all those affected by this terrible situation."
U.S. Rep. André Carson, D-Indiana, whose district includes Indianapolis, said that he was heartbroken by the incident.
"I am heartbroken by the mass shooting at the FedEx facility here in Indianapolis and praying for all affected by this tragedy," he said on Twitter. "I am communicating with local authorities to get all details of the attack and my office stands ready to help everyone affected any way we can."
There have been several mass shootings in the U.S. in recent weeks, including an April 8 shooting at a cabinet company facility in Bryan, Texas, that left one person dead and five others wounded.
Last week, President Joe Biden announced a series of executive actions aimed at tackling what he called a national "epidemic."
"Gun violence in this country is an epidemic and it is an international embarrassment," Biden said at the time.
His proposals, which are likely to face legal hurdles, are aimed at reducing mass shootings, suicides and domestic violence.
They aim to limit so-called "ghost guns," which can be assembled at home without traceable serial numbers, and make it easier for relatives to flag family members who shouldn't be allowed to buy firearms.
Biden is also seeking to reduce access to stabilizing braces, which can effectively turn a pistol into a more lethal rifle while not being subject to the same regulations that a rifle of similar size would be.
The president will be briefed on the shooting later Friday morning, a White House official told NBC News. The White House chief of staff has been in touch with Indianapolis' mayor, according to the official, who added that the Homeland Security advisor is in contact with law enforcement.
Gun violence in general has skyrocketed in recent years.
The Gun Violence Archive, a nonprofit group that tracks gun violence in the U.S., found that more than 19,000 people died in gun homicides last year. This was the the highest yearly figure in more than two decades, up by nearly 25 percent from 2019.
A health care worker carries a stack of clipboards at a COVID-19 testing site. (photo: AP)
Dhruv Khullar | What Will It Take to Pandemic-Proof America?
Dhruv Khullar, The New Yorker
Khullar writes: "When the next virus strikes, we'll look back on this moment as an opportunity that we either seized or squandered."
n September 29, 1982, a twelve-year-old girl named Mary Kellerman woke up with a cold. Her parents gave her some extra-strength Tylenol and, within a few hours, she had died. That same day, in a town near the family’s Chicago suburb, a twenty-seven-year-old postal worker named Adam Janus felt ill; he, too, took Tylenol and died hours later. Janus’s brother and sister-in-law gathered at his home to grieve, developed headaches, and took Tylenol from the same bottle; both died shortly thereafter. Three more mysterious deaths soon followed. State and federal investigators descended on the Chicago area. They quickly determined that the Tylenol had been laced with cyanide: someone had taken bottles off the shelf, injected the capsules with poison, and put them back into stores.
Within a week, more than ninety per cent of Americans had heard that cyanide-laced Tylenol was killing people in Chicago. Sales of the medication plummeted by four-fifths. Johnson & Johnson recalled every bottle in the country, at a cost of more than a hundred million dollars, then began working with the Food and Drug Administration to develop tamper-proof packaging. Tylenol had come in capsules, which were easy to swallow but could be opened and adulterated; the company replaced them with “caplet” pills that were much harder to contaminate, and started packaging them in foil-sealed childproof containers. Not long afterward, Congress made it a federal offense to tamper with consumer products, and the F.D.A. started requiring tamper-resistant packaging for all drugs. In the years since, there have been scattered attempts at similar crimes, but none as deadly as the Tylenol murders. Today, Americans hardly ever worry that their medications or groceries might contain poison.
Some problems we confront and eliminate. Others become part of the fabric of our society. Gun violence is an obvious example: more than a hundred Americans die of gun-related injuries each day, but we still don’t embrace the policies that could help. SARS-CoV-2 has killed one in every six hundred Americans, and future pandemics are basically unavoidable—and so, as the end of this pandemic approaches, the question is whether we’ll embrace the policies that could protect us next time. Will our path resemble the one that resulted in the near-total elimination of tainted drugs, or the one that’s led to our weary acceptance of mass shootings?
When it arrives, the next pandemic could very well be worse than the one we’re experiencing now. SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, is less deadly than SARS-CoV-1, which, when it broke out, in 2002, killed eleven per cent of those it infected. SARS-CoV-2 is less transmissible than measles, which is at least ten times more communicable; it has proved easier to vaccinate against than H.I.V., for which a shot has yet to be developed. From the midst of the next pandemic, we’ll almost certainly look back on the Biden Presidency as a time when we either seized or squandered the chance to prepare for the inevitable. The moment to pandemic-proof America is now.
Some countries came into our current pandemic prepared by experience. South Korea, for example, had confronted MERS—Middle East Respiratory Syndrome, caused by another coronavirus, MERS-CoV—in the spring of 2015. That outbreak began when a businessman returned to Seoul after spending ten days in Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates, and Saudi Arabia. Within a week, he developed fevers and muscle pains. He soon visited a nearby clinic, a local hospital, and a large academic medical center, where MERS was finally identified; he recovered, but during his journey through the medical system he infected more than two dozen people, including another man who travelled between hospitals, spreading the disease to at least eighty others.
As MERS spread in South Korea, testing was often slow or unavailable, and the government didn’t share what it knew about where outbreaks were occurring. The virus shuttled undetected through the medical system—nearly half of all infections would eventually be linked to hospitals—and people started avoiding medical care altogether. In the two months it took to get the virus under control, South Korea quarantined more than sixteen thousand people and recorded a hundred and eighty-six infections and thirty-eight deaths. (The coronavirus that causes MERS is twenty times as deadly as SARS-CoV-2.) The economy faltered, and seven in ten Koreans said they disapproved of the government’s response.
In the years afterward, South Korea introduced major changes to prepare itself for the next virus. It passed a law that empowered labs to use unapproved diagnostic tests in case of emergencies. It dramatically expanded the power of health officials, allowing them to close hospitals when needed and to access surveillance footage and other information for confirmed and suspected carriers. In future outbreaks, local governments would be required to alert residents to the number and location of nearby infections; the isolation of potentially infectious individuals would be mandatory, with fines for those who failed to comply. (In the U.S., during this pandemic, measures like these have been optional.) The directorship of the Korea Disease Control and Prevention Agency was elevated to a top position within the government. A new public-health emergency-response team was established, and a special department was created to focus on risk communication. The government hired more epidemiologists, bolstered border-screening measures, and required hospitals to increase the number of negative-pressure isolation rooms. All this contributed to the fact that, beginning last year, South Korea mounted among the most effective pandemic responses in the world, recording around seventeen hundred COVID-19 deaths across a population of fifty-two million people.
In the United States, the coronavirus pandemic has revealed a specific set of systemic weaknesses that need to be addressed for next time. The country’s stockpile of emergency equipment proved inadequate, as did its test-and-trace infrastructure. Federal public-health agencies and programs and local health departments were underfunded and unprepared. Michael Osterholm, an epidemiologist at the University of Minnesota and a member of President Biden’s COVID-19 transition advisory board, told me that there was a sense in which these failures were unsurprising: before the coronavirus, Americans were collectively incapable of imagining just how deadly and disruptive a wildly contagious pathogen could be. “We’ve long had this complacency, because we thought of infectious diseases as something that affected low-income countries,” he said. “We’ve had this attitude of, ‘As long as it’s over there, it’s not our problem.’ Well, now we’ve had a taste of what it means to live with a deadly virus. What are we going to do about it?”
The changes we need to make can be grouped into three broad categories. The first is disease surveillance. “We have no idea what’s out there,” Farzad Mostashari, a former assistant commissioner of New York City’s public-health department and the Obama Administration’s national coördinator of health information technology, told me. Health agencies must be able to identify and track outbreaks before they get out of control; to do so, they must collect viral samples and send them to local laboratories on a continuous basis. This requires funding, but, Mostashari said, it also demands an investment in the nation’s “public-health informatics” infrastructure. Mostashari cited his experience at New York City’s health department, from 2005 to 2009: he regularly handled fifty-nine separate data feeds—Word files, Excel files, CSV files, TXT files—from the city’s fifty-nine emergency departments, spending hours each week trying to make sense of it all. There have been improvements since then, but the basic problem persists. “What we need is a single national platform—a common set of tools—that brings in data from every state in an organized way,” he said. “There would still be local control and governance of the data, but it would be standardized and interoperable across the country.”
Funding for such a system must be not just substantial but long-term. After 9/11, hundreds of millions of dollars were sent to state and local health departments—but, Mostashari said, the money later dried up. “We need to think of public health like defense,” he said. “The systems we maintain during peacetime are the ones that allow us to succeed at war.” Mostashari told me that he thinks a set percentage of U.S. health-care spending should be earmarked for public-health efforts. Sylvia Burwell, who ran the Department of Health and Human Services under President Barack Obama, concurred: she argued that the federal government should create a single strategy spanning every agency involved with public health. “This is about more than health,” she said. “It’s about our national security and our economic prosperity. We need to start acting like it.”
Early in the pandemic, widespread shortages of P.P.E., ventilators, and medications revealed deep vulnerabilities in America’s medical-supply chains. Seventy per cent of the drugs used in the U.S. are manufactured overseas; supplies were limited for twenty-nine of the forty drugs vital to the treatment of COVID-19. The Department of Defense is required by law to purchase some military equipment from U.S. companies. Similarly, federal health agencies could be required to funnel purchase orders for respirators, ventilators, and some drugs to domestic suppliers.
Another group of necessary improvements centers on vaccine development. There’s no way to say for sure which virus will cause the next pandemic; still, we know that some viruses are more dangerous than others. Viruses that use RNA for their genetic code tend to mutate faster than those that use DNA, because RNA-based viruses have less sophisticated “proofreading” machinery. Those that circulate in animals are more likely to mutate in dangerous ways while evading human detection. (Some three-quarters of new infectious diseases are thought to originate in animals.) Viruses that travel by means of respiratory droplets—as opposed to water, feces, mosquitoes, or sex—have the most explosive potential. Researchers could develop treatments and protocols in advance for viruses that combine these and other characteristics: the likely suspects include influenzas, coronaviruses, filoviruses (such as Ebola and Marburg), and paramyxoviruses (a viral family that includes measles and mumps, but also deadly pathogens for which there are no vaccines, such as Nipah virus and Hendra virus).
“We now have this incredible mRNA technology which allows us to make vaccines very quickly,” Seth Berkley, the C.E.O. of Gavi, an organization that helps vaccinate children in poor countries, told me. “And for vectored vaccines, we could partially develop them, freeze them for a time, and then complete the development process more rapidly when they’re needed.” That sort of pre-planning will require strong partnerships between universities and industry. “Academic research is critical, but professors rarely make vaccines,” Berkley explained. “The goal should be for academia to let a thousand flowers bloom and then for institutions skilled in product development to cultivate the right ones.”
Encouraging companies to develop vaccines ahead of time will require restructuring the financial incentives behind them. When I spoke with Amitabh Chandra, an economist at Harvard, he outlined three reasons that vaccines are bad investments for drug companies: pandemics are sporadic, and can end before a vaccine is finished; vaccines are targeted at specific pathogens, and so aren’t reusable (“People always get diabetes and have heart attacks—those are much surer bets”); and it’s hard to price vaccines at a level that generates large profits. “You’re probably selling your vaccine in a public-health emergency,” Chandra said. “That means you’re selling to governments and philanthropies, not private insurers that pay high prices.”
Chandra argues that a federal agency should serve as a guaranteed buyer of vaccines, therapies, tests, and emergency medical supplies for possible pandemic-causing viruses. He singles out BARDA—the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority—as a plausible candidate. Created in response to the 9/11 attacks, BARDA, which sits within the Department of Health and Human Services, is responsible for vaccine research, pandemic preparedness, and bioterrorism response; it currently has limited funding and independence. Chandra thinks that BARDA should be expanded into “an entity that promises to purchase products if they are successful—that will pay handsomely for success in specific domains and will give companies a clear sense of how much money they can expect to make.”
It’s important, Chandra argues, for the government to consistently fund the creation of vaccines and other treatments, even if they end up not being used. “When it comes to something like vaccines, you don’t want the best deal,” he said. “You don’t want to pay the minimum price. You want to overpay and attract the attention of many companies simultaneously.” This is especially true because vaccines are so hard to develop—they can look good in the lab but fail afterward. “Imagine if AstraZeneca and Merck were the only ones who had taken up the vaccine challenge,” Chandra said. “We’d be screwed.”
In a globalized age, it’s not enough for the U.S. to focus only on its own problems. A third category of improvement is our engagement with the rest of the world. As my colleague Jerome Groopman explains, in his recent review of Peter Hotez’s new book, “Preventing the Next Pandemic,” American diplomacy can play a meaningful role in fighting outbreaks: many poor countries lack the basic medical and public-health infrastructure to prevent and treat infectious diseases, which then spill across borders and over oceans. War and political instability are accelerants for the emergence and resurgence of deadly pathogens, through disruptions in sanitation, housing, and infrastructure. To the extent that the U.S. can help bring about a more peaceful, more prosperous world, it can help create a healthier one.
But the U.S. must also take some crucial steps in the specific realm of global health policy. The Biden Administration has begun that process by reëngaging with the World Health Organization; despite some stumbles early in the pandemic, the W.H.O. remains the world’s most important global-health body, performing an indispensable convening and communication function. Investing in the W.H.O. and other similar organizations is vital for the worldwide surveillance of emerging diseases, and also for influencing international policy on activities that pose a high infectious risk (including the proliferation of the wet markets that are thought to drive the “spillover” of many diseases).
The U.S. also has a vested interest in more directly insuring that people around the world have access to vaccines. In our current pandemic, countries with rampant viral spread—including the U.S.—have fuelled the emergence of coronavirus variants; the longer people go unvaccinated, the longer we live with the possibility of new and dangerous variants surfacing. In a future pandemic, with a more transmissible or lethal pathogen, the need for fast worldwide vaccination could be even more urgent.
Billions of people live in countries without the money, infrastructure, or geopolitical clout to get vaccines; they may have to wait until 2024 to get vaccinated against COVID-19. Since the start of the pandemic, Berkley, Gavi’s C.E.O., has been trying to fix this predictable problem. Last spring, Gavi, along with the W.H.O. and a Davos-based organization called the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations, launched COVAX, an ambitious global effort to promote equitable access to the COVID-19 vaccines. COVAX aims to coördinate the development, manufacturing, purchase, and global distribution of vaccines; the idea is to move the world away from bilateral deals between individual countries and companies, instead pooling global resources to distribute vaccines according to a population’s need and size. “It’s of course right for every political leader to think about his or her own constituents,” Berkley said. “But it’s foolish to think only of them in a global pandemic. You will never vaccinate one hundred per cent of your population. If there are large pockets of virus circulating around the globe, it will eventually get back to you. That has huge implications for trade, commerce, travel, and safety.”
After holding out for much of last year, the U.S. recently committed four billion dollars to COVAX; more than a hundred and ninety countries are now participating in the project, which has secured nearly two billion vaccine doses for distribution in 2021. Ninety-two of those countries—those deemed low- and middle-income—can receive vaccines at steeply discounted rates or free of charge. Most of the two billion doses will be distributed according to population size, but five per cent will be reserved for acute outbreaks. The goal is to vaccinate twenty per cent of the participating countries’ populations this year. “That would shift the character of the pandemic globally,” Berkley said. “It would protect the most vulnerable people and do a lot to reduce fear and health-system burden.” By participating in COVAX, the U.S. isn’t just helping to end this pandemic; it’s laying the groundwork for a better approach to the next one.
In October, Nicholas Christakis, a physician and sociologist at Yale, published “Apollo’s Arrow,” a book about the consequences of the coronavirus crisis. According to Christakis, what’s strange about how we think about the pandemic is that we think the pandemic is strange. “We think that living under plague is so unusual,” Christakis told me. “We think it’s outrageous that people are dying and economies are being crushed. The truth is that this has been happening for thousands of years. What’s new is our ability to invent and deploy a vaccine in real time.” Moderna shipped its vaccine to the National Institutes of Health just forty-two days after learning the genetic sequence of SARS-CoV-2; the first trial participant got a dose twenty-one days later. We’re lucky to live at a time when such speed is possible.
In other ways, though, the virus may have attacked our species at an unfortunate moment. “We have a thinned-out intellectual culture,” Christakis said. “We’ve lost our capacity for nuance. Everything is black or white, you’re either with me or against me. Masks are a sign of virtue or totalitarianism.” Our pandemic response has been hampered by a sharp rise in political tribalism and a costly collapse of public leadership.
Existential threats like pandemics tend to change human behavior in predictable ways. People grow more risk-averse, abstemious, religious. “The trope ‘there are no atheists in foxholes’ turns out to be true during times of plague,” Christakis said. During this crisis, Americans have become more religious, with a quarter saying that their faith has grown; more than half say that they’ve prayed for an end to the pandemic. But, when such crises end, religiosity declines, and people seek out risky behavior. The Jazz Age arrived after the 1918 flu pandemic; the baby boom followed the Second World War. There’s reason to believe the twenties will roar again.
In this pandemic, we’ve suffered because of weaknesses in our public-health infrastructure. But we’ve also struggled because of the words and actions of elected officials and everyday people. In some countries, people across society worked together to get new cases to zero; in America, adherence to basic public-health measures became the latest battle in an endless, destructive culture war. We were divided by masks, business closures, contact tracing, hydroxychloroquine, vaccines, herd immunity, and much else. Governors lifted restrictions even as the virus surged; states undermined cities trying to slow viral spread; crowds gathered at indoor campaign events; media outlets questioned the motives of health-care workers and the veracity of the coronavirus death toll; millions of Americans flew around the country during the holidays, infecting people in the process. During the pandemic, Americans were among the most divided people on the planet.
What can be done to insure that we’re more united when the next plague strikes? Good policy might make our health system more pandemic-proof, but technocratic solutions can do only so much to address a lack of social cohesion. Beliefs about science, freedom, individual responsibility, and collective action are profoundly influenced by one’s community and sense of identity. For some Americans, pandemic denialism has become a misguided form of patriotism.
But the story of this pandemic isn’t yet over. For all Americans, the arrival of COVID-19 was a calamity without precedent. It was the first time in generations that the country had faced such a threat. Instantly and persistently, the virus has upended how we think, act, work, and live. Looking back now, it’s hard to fathom how bizarre today’s routines would seem to our pre-pandemic selves. That fact alone suggests that transformational change is possible, and that, once it arrives, it no longer seems so unattainable.
Mumia Abu-Jamal. (Photo: Free Mumia)
Mumia Abu-Jamal to Undergo Heart Surgery; Supporters Call for His Release
Emily Scott, WHYY
Scott writes: "Supporters of Mumia Abu-Jamal hosted an emergency press conference Thursday, after news that the activist and former journalist, incarcerated for the killing of a Philadelphia police officer 40 years ago, will undergo heart surgery in the coming days."
According to Wadiya Jamal, his wife, and MOVE member Pam Africa, who normally speaks with Abu-Jamal daily, they had been unable to reach him for four days. On Wednesday, Abu-Jamal’s lawyer informed his close supporters that he complained of chest pain while on a walk at SCI-Mahanoy in Schuylkill County and was taken to the prison infirmary. From there, Abu-Jamal was taken to an undisclosed hospital, where it was discovered that several of his coronary arteries were blocked, for which he will receive surgery.
Abu-Jamal had previously been diagnosed with congestive heart failure, diabetes, liver cirrhosis and, most recently, COVID-19.
“We are here to save a life, and we are here to fight for justice,” said Marc Lamont Hill, a Temple University professor and owner of Uncle Bobbie’s Books in Germantown.
Organizers of the press conference had a list of explicit demands regarding Abu-Jamal’s care:
- That before surgery, Abu-Jamal be allowed to call his wife; Pam Africa; his chosen doctor, Ricardo Alvarez; and his spiritual adviser, Mark Taylor
- That Abu-Jamal not be shackled in his hospital bed.
- That Abu-Jamal be immediately released from prison.
Johanna Fernández, a longtime advocate and supporter of Abu-Jamal, said that there are also concerns about the lack of information being provided to Abu-Jamal’s closest allies, and that it went against his right as a patient that he was unable to contact his loved ones for days after his hospitalization.
“Think about the barbarism of a system that feels there is no right of a prisoner that the state must respect,” said Fernández, a history professor at Baruch College in New York.
Alvarez, Abu-Jamal’s chosen physician, has had little access to Abu-Jamal’s current medical team and has not been informed regarding his patient’s health and the steps being taken to treat him. During Thursday’s press conference, Alvarez said he believes Abu-Jamal will undergo open heart surgery to treat his clogged arteries, but he added that demands for more information regarding his treatment have gone unmet.
A spokesperson for the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections said they cannot comment on a prisoner’s health.
The latest calls for action for the release of Abu-Jamal come a month after a press conference at which his supporters said that he was diagnosed with COVID-19, that his breathing was “labored,” and that he was experiencing pain in his chest.
“A question we have … Mumia was just hospitalized … and if he had blocked arteries and they conducted a battery of tests, shouldn’t some of that been identified?” Fernández asked. “You are clearly not doing what needs to be done to save the life of another human being.”
Angela Davis, a renowned scholar and political activist for incarcerated people, said Abu-Jamal’s condition mirrors that of so many others behind bars.
“He needs us to stand with him as he confronts the brutal power of the state and as he tries to grapple with his medical condition, produced and exacerbated by prison authorities,” Davis said. “This is our time to represent our collective rage over his treatment and treatment of other aging prisoners.”
As Abu-Jamal’s personal physician, Alvarez said that his patient has medically documented evidence of harm, noting that his cirrhosis of the liver is due to the deliberate holding back of lifesaving medications to treat the disease.
“One of the greatest harms to Mumia is state violence,” Alvarez said. “We support Mumia from the only possible treatment, which is freedom.”
Hundreds of people across the world attended the press conference via Zoom, including participants in Austria, Greece, Martinique, and elsewhere in the United States.
Abu-Jamal’s 67th birthday is April 24. A weekend of action was already planned prior to his latest health problems, including a City Hall rally on his birthday.
In December 1981, Abu-Jamal was charged with the murder of Philadelphia police officer Daniel Faulkner. Throughout his 40-year incarceration, Abu-Jamal and his supporters have maintained his innocence, despite several upheld convictions and denied appeals.
In December 2020, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court denied a petition filed by the slain officer’s widow, Maureen Faulkner, asking for District Attorney Larry Krasner’s office to be removed from handling future appeals in the case.
Before he was brutally killed by racists in Mississippi at 14, Emmett Till, left, had sometimes been cared for by the mother of Chicago Black Panther leader Fred Hampton, right, who was shot to death by police in 1969. (photo: unknown)
From Emmett Till to Daunte Wright, the Eerie Ties Among Black Victims of Violence
Sydney Trent, The Washington Post
Trent writes: "The connections are as revealing as they are disturbing."
Daunte Wright, who was killed by police Sunday at a traffic stop in Minneapolis by a White police officer who confused her gun for a Taser, knew George Floyd’s former girlfriend.
Caron Nazario, a Black Army officer threatened by White police officers during a traffic stop in Windsor, Va., considered Eric Garner, who died in a police chokehold on Staten Island in 2014, his uncle.
Yet the bonds of trauma have tethered Black people together long before now.
Consider this: Iberia Hampton, the mother of slain Black Panther leader Fred Hampton, used to babysit for Emmett Till, whose searingly brutal killing by White racists in Mississippi in 1955 when he was 14 helped usher in the civil rights movement.
Iberia Hampton and Mamie Till had both moved to the Chicago area from the South — Hampton from Haynesville, La., and Till from Money, Miss. — during the Great Migration of African Americans fleeing Jim Crow to seek opportunity in Northern cities.
The two women became neighbors in the working-class town of Summit Argo, just outside Chicago. Hampton’s husband, Francis, and Till’s spouse, Louis, both worked at the processing plant for Corn Products, the maker of Kayo Syrup and Argo Corn Starch that served as a draw for Black migrants.
Iberia Hampton and Mamie Till had a mutual friend, Fannie Wesley, who babysat Emmett for Mamie. If Wesley couldn’t do it, Iberia, who was staying at home with her three young children, Fred, Bill and Dee Dee, would often pitch in, Jeffrey Hass, a civil rights lawyer who once represented Hampton and the Black Panthers, said in an interview with The Washington Post.
Emmett, whose nickname was “Bobo,” was “curious and quite rambunctious, a handful,” Iberia Hampton recalled to Jeffrey Haas in his book “The Assassination of Fred Hampton: How the FBI and the Chicago Police Murdered a Black Panther.” At the time the arrangement started, Iberia’s son Fred, born in 1948, was just a toddler; the bright-eyed Emmett was about 10 or 11.
Fred Hampton had just started grade school in the summer of 1955, when Emmett, by then 14, went to visit his relatives near Money in the Mississippi Delta region.
It was there that Emmett was accused of whistling at 21-year-old Carolyn Bryant, a White woman who decades later acknowledged that she had lied about their interaction in the book “The Blood of Emmett Till.”
On Aug. 28, 1955, Bryant’s husband, Roy, and his half brother J.W. Milan, abducted Emmett at his great-uncle’s house. They beat and mutilated the child before shooting him in the head and shoving him into the Tallahatchie River.
“Fred, Dee Dee and I used to talk about Emmett, particularly when we went South,” Fred’s older brother, Bill Hampton, told Haas. Their mother had told them that Emmett had a “funny lisp. … We heard that it was his lisp, which sometimes came out like a whistle, that had cost Emmett his life.”
Emmett’s body, bloated and barely recognizable, was brought back to Chicago, where his mother insisted on a public funeral with an open casket so all could bear witness to the racist brutality of her son’s murder. Thousands walked past his open casket at the Rayner Funeral Home.
Iberia Hampton couldn’t bring herself to go. “I couldn’t stand going to his funeral and seeing him like that,” she said. “I wanted to remember him as the active and saucy kid I babysat for.”
In 1958, when Fred was 10, the family moved to Maywood, a working-class suburb west of Chicago. Although Fred was popular with the other children, his peers made fun of his large “watermelon” head, his mother told Haas. Fred fought back by cutting down his opponents with sharp but humorous word play, known as “the nines” or “the dozens” in African American parlance.
This was a feat, given that Fred, like Emmett, also had a lisp. He overcame it by enunciating clearly and quickly and, growing in confidence, imitating the artful oratory of well-known Black preachers, his father told Haas.
By the time he was a teenager, Fred was using his voice to speak out, successfully pushing for more Black teachers and administrators at his integrated high school and leading a boycott that resulted in students electing the first Black homecoming queen. He also led a youth branch of the NAACP, recruiting hundreds of peers to join.
Like Emmett and so many other Black children whose parents had migrated north, the Hampton children would head south in the summer to visit their relatives in Haynesville, La. Recalling what happened to young Emmett, the trips made Iberia anxious.
“I was a little nervous about letting them go back south, particularly because Fred had such a big mouth,” she said.
By his late teens, Hampton became attracted to the Black Panther Party, with its ethos of self-determination, socialism and armed self-defense, particularly against police brutality. In November 1968, he joined the party’s newly founded Illinois chapter.
Soon, the charismatic and oratorically gifted Hampton had become the party’s leader in Chicago. He managed to broker a peace agreement between Chicago’s most powerful gangs before forging a multiracial alliance of Black Panthers, White leftists and Latino activists that became known as the Rainbow Coalition.
He organized rallies, attended strikes, taught political education and spearheaded the party’s free breakfast program, for which his mother frequently cooked, Haas said. Soon he began to move up the party’s national ranks. By then, J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI had already pegged the young activist as a threat, opening a file on him in 1967.
The agency offered to drop charges against a Black teenage car thief named William O’Neil in exchange for his infiltration of the Chicago chapter of the party as a paid informant — a relationship that formed the crux of the plot in the Oscar-nominated movie “Judas and the Black Messiah” about the Hampton assassination.
O’Neal drew a map of the apartment where Hampton lived with his girlfriend, Deborah Johnson, who was pregnant with their first child. In the early morning hours of Dec. 4, 1968, Hampton nodded off as he was listening to his mother on the phone, probably a result of sleeping pills O’Neal had slipped into his drink. At 4 a.m., a heavily armed team of Chicago police officers burst into the apartment. Hampton was shot by police in the shoulder as he lay in bed and then killed with two shots to the head. Johnson later recalled an officer saying, “He’s good and dead now.”
Later that day, people in the neighborhood moved freely through the unsecured apartment to pay tribute to their fallen hero Hampton and Panthers defense captain Mark Clark, who was also killed by police in the raid. Haas’s fellow Panthers attorney, Flint Taylor, had lingered to examine the bullet-ridden walls when he overheard a woman muttering that the police raid was “nothin’ but a Northern lynching.” The phrase evoked the murder of Emmett Till, but in a place where Black people had come to escape.
On Dec. 9, 1969, 14 years after glimpsing Emmett’s ravaged body, Chicagoans streamed through the Rayner Funeral Home again, this time to pay their respects at the open casket of Hampton.
He was just 21, and Iberia Hampton’s worst fears had come true.
The ruling now leaves Lula da Silva free to run against Jair Bolsonaro for presidency next year. (photo: RTE)
Brazil Supreme Court Confirms Annulment of All Charges Against Lula
teleSUR
Excerpt: "As a result of the Supreme Court's affirmation of the annulment, Lula will recover all of his political rights and be able to run, if he and his party so choose, in the country's upcoming presidential elections in 2021."
Brazil's Supreme Court on Thursday ratified the decision adopted by one of its judges, who annulled the sentences handed down in the first place against former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.
s a result of the Supreme Court's affirmation of the annulment, Lula will recover all of his political rights and be able to run, if he and his party so choose, in the country's upcoming presidential elections in 2021.
The Supreme Court decision was approved by eight votes to three and supported the position of Judge Edson Fachin, who on March 8 had annulled all of the sentences against Lula, which totaled almost 25 years of imprisonment, through a precautionary measure, due to a conflict of jurisdiction.
Fachin considered that the two trials in which Lula was sentenced to prison, and two others in which there was still no sentence, were irregular since they were conducted in the courts of the city of Curitiba, under the charge of former judge Sergio Moro, who did not have jurisdiction whatsoever over these matters.
Pizzly bear. (photo: Arterra)
Climate Crisis Pushing Polar Bears to Mate With Grizzlies, Producing Hybrid 'Pizzly' Bears
Harry Cockburn, The Independent
Cockburn writes: "Back in 2006, a strange polar bear was seen in the Northwest Territories of the Canadian Arctic. It had patches of brown on its otherwise white fur and an unusual face shape."
Scientists say warming Arctic is expanding range of grizzlies, bringing species into greater contact
Hunters shot the bear dead and DNA tests confirmed what had been suspected: it was the hybrid offspring of a polar bear and a grizzly bear.
In 2010, another hybrid bear was shot by a hunter in the western Canadian Arctic. Tests revealed this animal was a second-generation cross born of a hybrid mother and grizzly father.
These were the first recorded instances of so-called “pizzly” or “grolar” bears. But over the last decade researchers have noted an increase in sightings of the hybrid creatures, and believe the climate crisis is behind the rise.
As the world has warmed, temperatures in the Arctic have risen about twice as fast as they have elsewhere in a phenomenon known as Arctic amplification.
Larissa DeSantis, a paleontologist and associate professor of biological sciences at Vanderbilt University in Tennessee, told The Independent the climate crisis “was definitely playing a role” in the hybridisation of bears.
The rapid changes to the Arctic environment have resulted in declining sea ice, which the polar bears depend on to hunt, but scientists also believe it is allowing grizzly bears to expand their territories further north.
The result is that grizzly bear ranges are now within polar bear ranges and the two species are coming into contact with each other with greater regularity.
Dr DeSantis’s recent research has been into the dietary habits of bears and how the climate crisis is impacting them, with polar bears increasingly forced to scavenge from human waste as they look for alternative food sources.
“Polar bears are so specialised on hunting seals that they may have a harder time adapting to the warming Arctic,” she said.
“The shift to eating hard foods in a handful of bears in the 21st century is also concerning. Polar bears may be reaching a tipping point and may now be forced to consume less-preferred foods.”
Unlike polar bears, Dr DeSantis said, grizzlies are well adapted to eating hard foods such as plant tubers or to scavenge carcasses when resources are limited. The changing terrain brought about by the warming climate also means that grizzly bears can venture further north and compete with polar bears for whatever food is available.
Some scientists have warned that greater instances of hybridisation could threaten biodiversity, if the process results in the loss or replacement of existing species.
But it is not the first time hybrid species have been recorded in the Arctic. According to the journal Nature, in the late 1980s, a whale found in west Greenland was believed to be a narwhal–beluga mix dubbed the narluga.
In 2009, a whale appearing to be a hybrid of a bowhead whale and right whale was photographed in the Bering Sea, between Alaska and Russia.
Meanwhile Dall’s porpoises have been recorded mating with harbour porpoises off the coast of British Columbia, and numerous seal hybrids have been identified in museum specimens and in the wild.
‘Pizzly bears’ Q&A with Dr Larissa DeSantis
Is it known how many hybrid polar-grizzly bears are in existence?
This is not known and remains a big question. But, we do know that this has happened numerous times, including in the past based on genetic data. There is evidence of admixture in bears, times when polar bear DNA has become integrated with grizzly bear DNA. We also know that they only diverged about 500-600 thousand years ago.
Why has this happened, and what is the role of the climate crisis in this?
Climate change and in particular arctic warming is definitely playing a role. The warming arctic is resulting in grizzly bears moving north due to warming conditions, while at the same time polar bears are having difficulty hunting from sea ice and [finding] bowhead whale carcasses where these bears engage in opportunistic mating.
Are there clear benefits for the hybrid bears?
We need to study the effects of hybridisation on these bears. Most of the time hybrids are not more vigorous than either of the two species, as grizzlies and brown bears have unique adaptations for their particular environments. However, there are a few examples where hybrids can be more vigorous and better able to adapt to a particular environment, particularly if the environment is deviating from what it once was. This requires further study and careful monitoring. Time will tell if these hybrids are better able to withstand a warming Arctic. These hybrids might be better suited for a broader range of food sources, like the grizzly bear, and in contrast to polar bears which are hyper-specialised.
Can hybrid bears mate and produce offspring with either polar bears, grizzly bears or other hybrid bears?
This is difficult to assess, but overall there is clear evidence of hybridisation. There is also evidence that these hybrids are fertile and there are second generation hybrids, where hybrids have mated with grizzly, for example. Additionally, hybridisation has been observed in captivity.
Do the hybrid bears stand a better chance of long-term survival than polar bears?
Unfortunately, what we are learning about the polar bear and what we know about hyper-specialised apex predators in the past, such as sabertooth cats, does give us reason to be concerned with the ability, or rather inability, of polar bears to adapt to a warming Arctic, especially when climate change is occurring at an unprecedented rate.
The hybrids do have certain features like intermediate skull forms that may make them better suited for eating mechanically challenging food, but this comes with trade offs: they are not as strong swimmers as polar bears.
If the warming Arctic makes seal hunting from sea ice untenable, then perhaps the hybrid pizzly or grolar bears can give hope for the survival of these types of bears. That being said, more research and monitoring is needed.
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