“Hundreds of world leaders, powerful politicians, billionaires, celebrities, religious leaders and drug dealers have been hiding their investments in mansions, exclusive beachfront property, yachts and other assets for the past quarter-century, according to a review of nearly 12 million files obtained from 14 firms located around the world.
The report released Sunday by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists involved 600 journalists from 150 media outlets in 117 countries. It’s being dubbed the ‘Pandora Papers’ because the findings shed light on the previously hidden dealings of the elite and the corrupt, and how they have used offshore accounts to shield assets collectively worth trillions of dollars.
The more than 330 current and former politicians identified as beneficiaries of the secret accounts include Jordan’s King Abdullah II, former U.K. Prime Minister Tony Blair, Czech Republic Prime Minister Andrej Babis, Kenyan President Uhuru Kenyatta, Ecuador’s President Guillermo Lasso, and associates of both Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan and Russian President Vladimir Putin.
The billionaires called out in the report include Turkish construction mogul Erman Ilicak and Robert T. Brockman, the former CEO of software maker Reynolds & Reynolds.
Many of the accounts were designed to evade taxes and conceal assets for other shady reasons, according to the report.
‘The new data leak must be a wake-up call,’ said Sven Giegold, a Green party lawmaker in the European Parliament. ‘Global tax evasion fuels global inequality. We need to expand and sharpen the countermeasures now.’
Oxfam International, a British consortium of charities, applauded the Pandora Papers for exposing brazen examples of greed that deprived countries of tax revenue that could be used to finance programs and projects for the greater good.
‘This is where our missing hospitals are,’ Oxfam said in a statement. ‘This is where the pay-packets sit of all the extra teachers and firefighters and public servants we need. Whenever a politician or business leader claims there is ‘no money’ to pay for climate damage and innovation, for more and better jobs, for a fair post-COVID recovery, for more overseas aid, they know where to look.’
The Pandora Papers are a follow-up to a similar project released in 2016 called the ‘Panama Papers’ compiled by the same journalistic group.
The latest bombshell is even more expansive, porting through nearly 3 terabytes of data — the equivalent of roughly 750,000 photos on a smartphone — leaked from 14 different service providers doing business in 38 different jurisdictions in the world. The records date back to the 1970s, but most of the files span from 1996 to 2020.
In contrast, the Panama Papers culled through 2.6 terabytes of data leaked by one now-defunct law firm called Mossack Fonseca that was located in the country that inspired that project’s nickname.” Read more at AP News
“NEW YORK (AP) — A data scientist who was revealed Sunday as the Facebook whistleblower says that whenever there was a conflict between the public good and what benefited the company, the social media giant would choose its own interests.
Frances Haugen was identified in a ‘60 Minutes’ interview Sunday as the woman who anonymously filed complaints with federal law enforcement that the company’s own research shows how it magnifies hate and misinformation.
Haugen, who worked at Google and Pinterest before joining Facebook in 2019, said she had asked to work in an area of the company that fights misinformation, since she lost a friend to online conspiracy theories.
‘Facebook, over and over again, has shown it chooses profit over safety,’ she said. Haugen, who will testify before Congress this week, said she hopes that by coming forward the government will put regulations in place to govern the company’s activities.
She said Facebook prematurely turned off safeguards designed to thwart misinformation and rabble rousing after Joe Biden defeated Donald Trump last year, alleging that contributed to the deadly Jan. 6 invasion of the U.S. Capitol.
Post-election, the company dissolved a unit on civic integrity where she had been working, which Haugen said was the moment she realized ‘I don’t trust that they’re willing to actually invest what needs to be invested to keep Facebook from being dangerous.’
At issue are algorithms that govern what shows up on users’ news feeds, and how they favor hateful content. Haugen said a 2018 change to the content flow contributed to more divisiveness and ill will in a network ostensibly created to bring people closer together.
Despite the enmity that the new algorithms were feeding, Facebook found that they helped keep people coming back — a pattern that helped the Menlo Park, California, social media giant sell more of the digital ads that generate most of its advertising.
Facebook’s annual revenue has more than doubled from $56 billion in 2018 to a projected $119 billion this year, based on the estimates of analysts surveyed by FactSet. Meanwhile, the company’s market value has soared from $375 billion at the end of 2018 to nearly $1 trillion now.
Even before the full interview came out on Sunday, a top Facebook executive was deriding the whistleblower’s allegations as ‘misleading.’
‘Social media has had a big impact on society in recent years, and Facebook is often a place where much of this debate plays out,’ Nick Clegg, the company’s vice president of policy and public affairs wrote to Facebook employees in a memo sent Friday. ‘But what evidence there is simply does not support the idea that Facebook, or social media more generally, is the primary cause of polarization.’
The ‘60 Minutes’ interview intensifies the spotlight already glaring on Facebook as lawmakers and regulators around the world scrutinize the social networking’s immense power to shape opinions and its polarizing effects on society.
The backlash has been intensifying since The Wall Street Journal’s mid-September publication of an expose that revealed Facebook’s internal research had concluded the social network’s attention-seeking algorithms had helped foster political dissent and contributed to mental health and emotional problems among teens, especially girls. After copying thousands of pages of Facebook’s internal research, Haugen leaked them to the Journal to provide the foundation for a succession of stories packaged as as the ‘Facebook Files.’
Although Facebook asserted the Journal had cherry picked the most damaging information in the internal documents to cast the company in the worst possible light, the revelations prompted an indefinite delay in the rollout of a kids’ version of its popular photo- and video-sharing app, Instagram. Facebook currently requires people to be at least 13 years old to open an Instagram account.” Read more at AP News
“STOCKHOLM (AP) — Two U.S.-based scientists were awarded the Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine on Monday for their discovery of the receptors that allow humans to feel temperature and touch.
David Julius and Ardem Patapoutian focused their work on the field of somatosensation, that is the ability of specialized organs such as eyes, ears and skin to see, hear and feel.
‘This really unlocks one of the secrets of nature,’ said Thomas Perlmann, secretary-general of the Nobel Committee, in announcing the winners. ‘It’s actually something that is crucial for our survival, so it’s a very important and profound discovery.’
The committee said Julius, 65, used capsaicin, the active component in chili peppers, to identify the nerve sensors that allow the skin to respond to heat.
Patapoutian found separate pressure-sensitive sensors in cells that respond to mechanical stimulation, it said.
The pair shared the prestigious Kavli Award for Neuroscience last year.” Read more at AP News
“Liberal and moderate Democrats are still at odds over crucial, high-dollar parts of Joe Biden’s legislative agenda. Remember, there are two bills at play here: an infrastructure bill and one focused on social spending and climate. The latter is causing particular concern, with a proposed price tag of $3.5 trillion. Moderate Democrats have balked at the figure and suggested a pared-down version of as little as $1.5 trillion. That’s been rejected by progressives, who are also vowing to withhold their votes on the roughly $1 trillion infrastructure bill if details of the other bill aren't ironed out first. The disagreements led House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to delay bringing the infrastructure bill to the floor for a vote late last week and will undoubtedly continue this week. Though Dems are facing criticism for how long it’s taking to agree on these key issues, Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin assured that the party won't let the US default on its debt on October 18.” Read more at CNN
“A new oral medicine that fights viral infection could give doctors a big leg-up in fighting Covid-19, but experts agree the best way to curb deaths and end the pandemic is still vaccination. Drug makers Merck and Ridgeback Biotherapeutics say their pill, molnupiravir, can reduce risk of Covid-19 hospitalization and death by 50%. They will seek emergency authorization for the antiviral medication from the FDA. Meanwhile, vaccination rates are still holding at about 56% among eligible Americans. Covid-19 has taken the lives of more than 700,000 people in the US, and about 200,000 of those deaths have occurred since vaccinations became widely available. The CDC has also updated its guidance on holiday celebrations as we enter a potentially treacherous winter. It recommends getting vaccinated before gatherings, wearing masks and celebrating virtually.” Read more at CNN
“That two-month cycle
Covid-19 is once again in retreat.
The reasons remain somewhat unclear, and there is no guarantee that the decline in caseloads will continue. But the turnaround is now large enough — and been going on long enough — to deserve attention.
The number of new daily cases in the U.S. has fallen 35 percent since Sept. 1:
Worldwide, cases have also dropped more than 30 percent since late August. ‘This is as good as the world has looked in many months,’ Dr. Eric Topol of Scripps Research wrote last week.
These declines are consistent with a pattern that regular readers of this newsletter will recognize: Covid’s mysterious two-month cycle. Since the Covid virus began spreading in late 2019, cases have often surged for about two months — sometimes because of a variant, like Delta — and then declined for about two months.
Epidemiologists do not understand why. Many popular explanations, like seasonality or the ebbs and flows of social distancing, are clearly insufficient, if not wrong. The two-month cycle has occurred during different seasons of the year and occurred even when human behavior was not changing in obvious ways.
The most plausible explanations involve some combination of virus biology and social networks. Perhaps each virus variant is especially likely to infect some people but not others — and once many of the most vulnerable have been exposed, the virus recedes. And perhaps a variant needs about two months to circulate through an average-sized community.
Human behavior does play a role, with people often becoming more careful once caseloads begin to rise. But social distancing is not as important as public discussion of the virus often imagines. ‘We’ve ascribed far too much human authority over the virus,’ as Michael Osterholm, an infectious-disease expert at the University of Minnesota, has told me.
The recent declines, for example, have occurred even as millions of American children have again crowded into school buildings.
Hospitalizations, too
Whatever the reasons, the two-month cycle keeps happening. It is visible in the global numbers, as you can see in the chart below. Cases rose from late February to late April, then fell until late June, rose again until late August and have been falling since.
The pattern has also been evident within countries, including India, Indonesia, Thailand, Britain, France and Spain. In each of them, the Delta variant led to a surge in cases lasting somewhere from one and a half to two and a half months.
In the U.S., the Delta surge started in several Southern states in June and began receding in those states in August. In much of the rest of the U.S., it began in July, and cases have begun falling the past few weeks. Even pediatric cases are falling, despite the lack of vaccine authorization for children under 12, as Jennifer Nuzzo of Johns Hopkins University told The Washington Post. (You can see the overall trends for every state here.)
The most encouraging news is that serious Covid illnesses are also declining. The number of Americans hospitalized with Covid has fallen about 25 percent since Sept. 1. Daily deaths — which typically change direction a few weeks after cases and hospitalizations — have fallen 10 percent since Sept. 20. It is the first sustained decline in deaths since the early summer.
This is the part of the newsletter where I need to emphasize that these declines may not persist. Covid’s two-month cycle is not some kind of iron law of science. There have been plenty of exceptions.
In Britain, for example, caseloads have seesawed over the past two months, rather than consistently fallen. In the U.S., the onset of cold weather and the increase in indoor activities — or some other unknown factor — could cause a rise in cases this fall. The course of the pandemic remains highly uncertain.
But this uncertainty also means that the near future could prove to be moreencouraging than we expect. And there are some legitimate reasons for Covid optimism.
The share of Americans 12 and over who have received at least one vaccine shot has reached 76 percent, and the growing number of vaccine mandates — along with the likely authorization of the Pfizer vaccine for children ages 5 to 11 — will increase the number of vaccinations this fall. Almost as important, something like one-half of Americans have probably had the Covid virus already, giving them some natural immunity.
Eventually, immunity will become widespread enough that another wave as large and damaging as the Delta wave will not be possible. ‘Barring something unexpected,’ Dr. Scott Gottlieb, a former F.D.A. commissioner and the author of ‘Uncontrolled Spread,’ a new book on Covid, told me, ‘I’m of the opinion that this is the last major wave of infection.’
Covid has not only been one of the worst pandemics in modern times. It has been an unnecessarily terrible pandemic. Of the more than 700,000 Americans who have died from it, nearly 200,000 probably could have been saved if they had chosen to take a vaccine. That is a national tragedy.
Covid also isn’t going to disappear anytime soon. It will continue to circulate for years, many scientists believe. But the vaccines can transform Covid into a manageable disease, not so different from a flu or common cold. In the past few weeks, the country appears to have moved closer to that less grim future.
Whatever this autumn brings, the worst of the pandemic is almost certainly behind us.” Read more at New York Times
“Protesters gathered across Brazil this weekend to call for the impeachment of President Jair Bolsonaro amid worsening economic conditions, hunger, unemployment and other persistent effects of the pandemic. This is not the first time Brazilians have organized to protest Bolsonaro, who has remained defiant in his handling of Covid-19 even as nearly a staggering 600,000 Brazilians have lost their lives to the virus. Bolsonaro’s approval rating has been on a continuous decline, and polls show more than half the country now considers his presidency to be bad or awful. This is especially important because Brazil is holding a presidential election next year, and there’s a possibility Bolsonaro could be ousted in favor of a more popular politician, like former President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva.” Read more at CNN
A seagull flies over oil washed up by the coast in Huntington Beach, Calif., on Sunday., Oct. 3, 2021. Ringo Chiu, AP
“A pipeline breach in the Pacific Ocean has dumped more than 3,000 barrels of oil -- equal to about 126,000 gallons of post-production crude -- along the Southern California coast. Dead birds and wildlife have been washing up on Huntington Beach in Orange County, and experts worry the spill could infiltrate wetlands and other vulnerable areas, creating an ecological disaster. The National Transportation Safety Board is sending investigators to gather information and assess the source of the oil spill, which as of yesterday morning had not fully stopped. The pipeline is owned by the oil and gas company Amplify Energy, which has pledged to participate in the recovery.” Read more at CNN
“After more than a year of debating its docket virtually due to COVID-19, the Supreme Court returns to work Monday with a docket full of controversial issues – abortion, guns and the death penalty. However, Associate Justice Brett Kavanaugh will participate remotely after testing positive for COVID-19 last week. Over the summer, a majority of the court handed down rulings that overturned President Joe Biden's eviction moratorium, blocked his ability to unwind immigration policy by his predecessor Donald Trump, and allowed Texas' restrictive abortion law to stand in a ruling that did not decide whether or not it's constitutional. Ahead of the Supreme Court's new term, Women's March protesters on Saturday staged hundreds of rallies across the country in support of reproductive rights.” Read more at USA Today
“WELLINGTON, New Zealand (AP) — New Zealand’s government acknowledged Monday what most other countries did long ago: It can no longer completely get rid of the coronavirus.
Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern announced a cautious plan to ease lockdown restrictions in Auckland, despite an outbreak there that continues to simmer.
Since early in the pandemic, New Zealand had pursued an unusual zero-tolerance approach to the virus through strict lockdowns and aggressive contact tracing.
Until recently, that elimination strategy had worked remarkably well for the country of 5 million, which has reported just 27 virus deaths.
While other nations faced rising death tolls and disrupted lives, New Zealanders went back to workplaces, school yards and sports stadiums safe from any community spread.
But that all changed when the more contagious delta variant somehow escaped from a quarantine facility in August after it was brought into the country from a traveler returning from Australia.
Despite New Zealand going into the strictest form of lockdown after just a single local case was detected, it ultimately wasn’t enough to crush the outbreak entirely.
One factor may have been that the disease spread among some groups that are typically more wary of authorities, including gang members and homeless people living in transitional housing.
The outbreak has grown to more than 1,300 cases, with 29 more detected on Monday. A few cases have been found outside of Auckland.
Ardern said that seven weeks of lockdown restrictions in Auckland had helped keep the outbreak under control.
‘For this outbreak, it’s clear that long periods of heavy restrictions has not got us to zero cases,’ Ardern said. ‘But that is OK. Elimination was important because we didn’t have vaccines. Now we do, so we can begin to change the way we do things.’
New Zealand began its vaccination campaign slowly compared to most other developed nations. Rates rocketed in August after the outbreak began but have dropped off significantly again since then.
About 65% of New Zealanders have had at least one dose and 40% are fully vaccinated. Among people age 12 and older, about 79% have had at least a single jab.
Under Ardern’s plan that starts Tuesday, Aucklanders will be able to meet outdoors with loved ones from one other household, early childhood centers will reopen and people will be able to go to the beach.
The dates for a phased reopening of retail stores and later bars and restaurants have yet to be decided.
Ardern said the elimination strategy had served the country incredibly well but the government always intended to eventually transition to the protection of vaccines, a change hastened by the delta variant ‘game changer.’” Read more at AP News
“Nikolas Cruz, the suspect in the 2018 killing of 17 people at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, is going on trial — but not for the slayings. Jury selection begins Monday on charges that Cruz attacked Sgt. Raymond Beltran, a Broward County jail guard. He faces a possible 15-year sentence if convicted of attempted criminal battery on a law enforcement officer and three lesser charges. Cruz, 23, will get either death or life in prison without parole if he is later found guilty of first-degree murder. If Cruz is convicted of attacking Beltran, prosecutors can argue that is an aggravating factor when they seek his execution during the penalty phase of his murder trial, which has been delayed by the pandemic and arguments over witnesses and evidence. No date has been set.” Read more at USA Today
“A very lucky winner could earn an estimated $670 million from Monday's Powerball drawing after no tickets hit all five numbers plus the Powerball on Saturday night. The new jackpot, if won, would be the sixth-largest in Powerball history and the eighth-largest U.S. lottery jackpot of all time, according to powerball.com. If the winner claims the cash option instead of a 30-year payout, they'll walk away with $474.8 million. The jackpot awaiting Monday's hopeful lottery participants hasn't been this big since Jan. 29, when an anonymous Maryland group won $731.1 million.” Read more at USA Today
“Clint Eastwood won a $6 million lawsuit against a Lithuanian company that used his image to promote CBD products.” Read more at New York Times
“Tom Brady became the N.F.L.’s career passing leader. He now has 80,560 career yards passing.” Read more at New York Times
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