Despite Tuesday’s flight, Jeff Bezos is running out of time to save Blue Origin

“What we know about Jeff Bezos is that he doesn’t like losing."

ERIC BERGER - 7/21/2021, 1:30 PM

Enlarge / Blue Origin’s New Shepard crew, Oliver Daemen, Mark Bezos, Jeff Bezos, and Wally Funk hold a press conference after flying into space in the Blue Origin New Shepard on July 20, 2021 in Van Horn, Texas.
Joe Raedle/Getty 


LAUNCH SITE ONE, Texas—Jeff Bezos burst from his spacecraft with a smile on his face as wide as the brim of the cowboy hat atop his head.

The founder of Amazon fulfilled a lifelong dream of flying into space Tuesday morning aboard a rocket and capsule he personally funded. During a few minutes of weightlessness, Bezos and his brother Mark had floated around the New Shepard capsule alongside aviation pioneer Wally Funk and an 18-year-old customer, Oliver Daemen. They tossed Skittles candy into one another’s mouths and enjoyed the view.

“Best day ever,” said Bezos, 57, after landing safely beneath three parachutes. “My expectations were high, and they were dramatically exceeded.”

Not everyone was thrilled by the adventures of the richest person in the world. With his brief 10-minute flight, Bezos provoked sharply divided reactions. Some people even wished Bezos had launched and never come back.

These critics expressed frustration with Bezos for busting unions and not treating Amazon employees well. Environmentalists despaired that as the world burns from climate change and other calamities, Bezos responded by jetting into space. And with all of his wealth, Bezos offered an inviting target for those who loathe ultra-rich billionaires and want them to pay their fair share of taxes. Criticism of Bezos spanned the ideological divide, from Tucker Carlson on Fox News to liberal Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

Meanwhile, within the space community, people mostly celebrated Bezos’ flight as the dawn of the private spaceflight era, which further opens the high frontier, with both Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic starting regular spaceflight service.

Scenes from launch day in Texas. Here, New Shepard rolls out to the launch site in the pre-dawn hours.
Blue Origin








Neither side is necessarily wrong. It is reasonable to both be uncomfortable with Bezos' extreme wealth and what that means for society but also recognize that Blue Origin has advanced spaceflight.

The real question is whether Bezos will make good on his stated intent to use his immense wealth for the good of humanity. What the legion critics of Bezos and Blue Origin miss is that the company legitimately has the goal of ultimately saving planet Earth. While Tuesday’s flight was clearly self-serving for Bezos, Blue Origin has follow-on projects in the works to support moving heavy industry from the surface of our planet into space.

To set humanity on this environmentally sustainable path, Bezos has lavished funding on Blue Origin, investing about $10 billion in the spaceflight company so far, with more coming every year. However, what Bezos has not invested into Blue Origin is his personal time, nor the driven leadership that propelled Amazon to the top of the heap of retail.Advertisement


So after he returned from his spaceflight on Tuesday, what I most wanted to know is whether Jeff Bezos is all-in on space. He has the vision. He has the money. But at the age of 57, does he have enough years or willingness to ensure Blue Origin’s success? Or will he leave Blue Origin to flounder and instead mostly retire to his half-billion-dollar yacht after a suborbital joyride?

The jury is very much out.

The vision

Bezos has a compelling vision for space, and it is entirely genuine. From way back before his Amazon days, Bezos has been a true believer in the power of using space to improve life on Earth. Our planet, he says, is a garden to be preserved.

“This is the only good planet in the Solar System,” he said on Tuesday, repeating a line he has often used. “We’ve sent robotic probes to all of them, and this is the only good one. We have to take care of it. And when you go to space and see how fragile Earth is, you’ll want to take care of it even more.”

To accomplish this, Bezos founded Blue Origin in 2000 to build a “road to space.” This simply means bringing down the cost of launching rockets by reusing them over and over again. By lowering the cost of reaching space, Bezos seeks to move heavy industry off Earth. Instead of strip-mining our planet, he says, we should glean those resources from lifeless asteroids.

Our insatiable energy needs, too, might be met by space-based solar power farms. And finally, expanding into space will allow humanity to grow as a species, eventually populating orbital settlements near Earth and then other worlds. This unlimited opportunity for expansion would save humans from entering a stasis and from fighting for increasingly scarce resources on Earth.

Bezos is theoretically right about all of this. Today, roughly half the world’s population lacks access to reliable electricity and reasonably high living conditions. The only long-term means to bring this half of the world’s population up to a standard of living enjoyed by the developed world, without destroying the Earth, is probably accessing the bounty of resources in space.


FURTHER READING Jeff Bezos unveils his sweeping vision for humanity’s future in space

Building such a space economy and a spacefaring civilization will not happen overnight, though, and that's why Bezos views Blue Origin as a multi-generational effort. “Big things start small, and this is how it starts,” Bezos said Tuesday.

The company has a plan. It started small with the New Shepard system and learned how to reuse rockets. It is currently developing the much larger New Glenn rocket, which will essentially use the New Shepard design as its second stage. There are plans for even bigger rockets down the line, all to move more mass to and from planet Earth much more cheaply.

Yet this plan has unfolded very slowly, and Bezos has not pushed forward with the same determination displayed by his leadership of Amazon. Blue Origin remains very far from self-sufficiency. Bezos still must pump more than $1 billion into Blue Origin annually to keep the lights on. Even for the world’s richest person, this kind of financial backing does not seem sustainable.Advertisement

Making matters even worse for Bezos? He must compete with Elon Musk and SpaceX.

A rivalry that wasn’t

During the middle of the 2010s, after more than a decade of near silence, Blue Origin emerged from stealth mode with all appearances of becoming a formidable space company. It seemed probable that two titans of the tech industry, Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk, would now battle for supremacy in the space arena.

In late 2014, Blue Origin stunned the space industry by announcing that it had reached a deal to build rocket engines for United Launch Alliance, then the premiere launch company in the United States. United Launch Alliance selected Blue’s BE-4 engine for its new Vulcan rocket over an offering from Aerojet Rocketdyne, the blueblood propulsion company behind the majority of large rocket engines in US history.

About a year later, Blue Origin pulled off another feat by safely launching and landing the New Shepard rocket and capsule on its up-and-down suborbital mission. This marked the first time in history that anyone—country or company—had vertically launched a first-stage rocket into space and then landed it back on the ground.

The next month, in December 2015, SpaceX repeated this launch-and-landing feat with its orbital Falcon 9 rocket for the first time. From a technical standpoint, the Falcon 9 landing was much more significant, as it requires about 30 times more energy to boost a payload into orbit and complicated engineering to slow such a booster down and return it to the landing site. No matter: After the Falcon 9 flight, Jeff Bezos cheekily tweeted, “Welcome to the club” to Musk and SpaceX.

Musk was decidedly not amused, but this banter underscored the emerging rivalry—Bezos and Musk, billionaire versus billionaire, on a quest to build reusable rockets and remake the space industry. Back then, it all seemed so clear: The 21st-century space race would be run by Blue Origin and SpaceX, and it was going to be a hell of a thing to watch.

Only it hasn’t been. There has been no race. Since the end of 2015, Blue Origin has launched its suborbital New Shepard system just 15 more times, an average of fewer than three missions per year. Only this week did humans finally get on board for a launch. As for the BE-4 engine, after promising it would be ready for spaceflight in 2017, Blue Origin has yet to deliver a flight-ready version to United Launch Alliance more than four years later.


SpaceX, by contrast, has ascended. Since December 2015, the company has successfully flown more than 100 orbital missions. It has developed and flown the world’s most powerful rocket, the Falcon Heavy, and may soon debut its still more titanic Starship launch system. With the Starlink Internet constellation, SpaceX now operates more satellites than any nation or company in the world. And in 2020, thanks to SpaceX, NASA broke its dependency on Russia for human spaceflight. NASA astronauts now ride to space in style inside the sleek Crew Dragon spacecraft.

Blue Origin has also lost out when it comes to large government contracts worth billions of dollars, something Bezos craves as he seeks to find some return on his massive investment in Blue Origin. In 2020, the Department of Defense said it would only allow United Launch Alliance and SpaceX to bid on national security launch contracts in the mid-2020s. Blue Origin protested and lost. Then, in April, NASA chose SpaceX alone for a prestigious Human Landing System. This came after Bezos showily unveiled his company’s “Blue Moon” lander in 2019. Blue Origin protested this, too, and a decision is expected in early August. It would come as a surprise if Blue Origin succeeds.

In short, a once-promising space race has become something of a damp squib. In late 2019, while reporting for my book on the origins of SpaceX, Liftoff, I asked Musk why he thought Blue Origin had fallen behind. “Bezos is not great at engineering, to be frank," Musk replied.

King of buildings

The road to Launch Site One travels north out of the dusty, time-worn town of Van Horn in West Texas. The two-lane road slaloms back and forth, twisting between weathered mountains like the rattlesnakes slithering through the nearby desert.

The mountains are green here, and Bezos owns a large chunk of them, with more than 300,000 acres under his control, including the Sierra Diablo range to the west of US Route 54. Where the mountains don’t climb hundreds of meters above the desert, a vast sea of scrubby flatlands spread into the distance, broken only by gullies. These are mostly dry, but they can fill quickly during nocturnal thunderstorms that brighten the night sky with brilliant lightning.


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Here, on about 80,000 acres, Blue Origin has built a launch and landing site for New Shepard, as well as test facilities for its rocket engines. A drive around Launch Site One, with its crisp white buildings rising above the desert, underscores the fact that Bezos is unquestionably good at building space infrastructure. The company has always been impressive in this way.

Bezos founded Blue Origin near his Amazon headquarters in Seattle, and for the first few years, it served mostly as a think tank exploring different ways to get into space. But soon, Bezos and a small team of engineers settled on the New Shepard plan to demonstrate reuse. During the first half of the 2010s, Blue Origin looked to be moving rapidly, as it built BE-3 rocket engines and New Shepard boosters. Visitors remarked that the burgeoning factory in Kent, Washington, had the feel of SpaceX’s frenetic headquarters in California.

In recent years, Blue Origin has kept on building things. In 2017, Blue Origin said it would invest $200 million to build a BE-4 rocket engine factory in Northern Alabama. Later that year, the company said it had nearly completed construction of a massive manufacturing factory in Florida for its New Glenn rocket. Blue Origin has also expanded its factory in Washington.

All told, Blue Origin now has millions of square feet of facilities. Currently, it just has precious little rocket hardware. For all of its construction efforts, Blue Origin has yet to deliver a BE-4 engine to United Launch Alliance. And the massive New Glenn rocket, about which Bezos has been talking for a decade, remains at least a couple of years away from its first flight.


FURTHER READING  Increasingly, the ULA-Blue Origin marriage is an unhappy one

The industry has taken notice, with popular memes such as United Launch Alliance chief Tory Bruno repeatedly asking, “Jeff, where are my engines?” Others show the huge New Glenn factory in Florida, which appears to be mostly empty.

As Blue Origin has fallen behind SpaceX in recent years, morale has declined, according to multiple sources. Bezos pushed the company further from its roots in late 2017 by sidelining long-time president Rob Meyerson and hiring a traditional aerospace veteran, Bob Smith, to become chief executive. Coming from Honeywell, Smith instituted a more bureaucratic management style, and Blue Origin’s progress seemed to slow significantly. Whereas Bezos' debut flight on New Shepard could have occurred as early as 2019, it slipped by months and eventually years. Critics of Smith’s plodding management style started referring to the company as “Blue Honeywell.”Advertisement


The decline in morale at Blue Origin coincided with a period when Bezos was increasingly distracted by making visits to Hollywood for Amazon Prime video, the assassination of Saudi writer Jamal Khashoggi (who worked for the Washington Post), a divorce from his wife MacKenzie, and more. He spent less time at the rocket company, and it suffered as a result.

The question is, now that Bezos has tasted spaceflight, will he become reinvigorated and pursue his ambitions with abandon?

“Losing to SpaceX cannot please him,” said Brad Stone, author of Amazon Unbound, a new book about Bezos and his retail empire. “What we know about Jeff Bezos is that he doesn’t like losing.”

However, Stone is not sure Bezos will take a strong hand at Blue Origin. Although Bezos seeded the company with principles, he also seeded dysfunction by installing a very different leader in Smith. Since 2017, Bezos has more or less let Smith run Blue Origin with freedom, and he may continue to do so. “It’s hard for me to see Bezos taking on a more prominent executive role at Blue Origin,” Stone said. 

Space needs both

Both SpaceX and Blue Origin are about 20 years old now. Both companies were founded by brilliant men capable of being ruthless in their business practices. Both founders see humanity’s future among the stars. But so far, one company has prospered while another has dithered. The difference, I think, is that from the beginning, Elon Musk has been all-in on SpaceX. Even today, while Bezos is enjoying the billionaire life and planning voyages on his mega-yacht, Musk is living in a $50,000 house in rural South Texas to keep his Starship project on track.

What we cannot know is whether this spaceflight experience will change Bezos. Certainly, he seems to have come back from his space trip more concerned about climate change. Shortly after the flight, Bezos said of his priorities moving forward, “I’m going to split my time between Blue Origin and the Bezos Earth Fund.” He has already committed $10 billion to his climate charity.

Much of the spaceflight community would appreciate a renewed focus on space by Bezos. There is a hunger for an alternative to Musk, for a true competitor that everyone envisioned Blue Origin would become back in 2015. Quite simply, Musk rubs some people the wrong way. He does not always play well with others. Often, SpaceX looks to grind its competitors into dust rather than find partnerships. Where the industry would like to see soufflés, Musk is happy to break eggs on the way to space—anything to get the job done. Which, to be fair, SpaceX does more than any other company in spaceflight

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Enlarge / Elon Musk exits federal court on April 4, 2019 in New York City. He might be laughing at a Jeff Bezos meme.
Drew Angerer/Getty Images


NASA, the US military, and other industry companies would welcome Blue Origin with open arms if the company could only execute on its programs. Lori Garver, a former deputy administrator of NASA who has known both Musk and Bezos for more than a decade, says such a competition would be tremendously helpful.

"Throughout history, great rivalries in business, science, and technology have led to great advancements,” she told Ars. “Having two extremely wealthy individuals who have an interest and long-term commitment to developing a spacefaring civilization is likely to benefit us all.”

Garver cited Leonardo and Michelangelo, Edison and Tesla, and Gates and Jobs as historical examples of this dynamic at work, by which the power of two improved each other and the state of progress.

“Neither Blue Origin or Virgin Galactic appear to be much of a rival to SpaceX today, but the winner in the competition to expand the railroads and aviation weren't always obvious, either,” she said.
The verdict

If Bezos thinks about this or reflects on how Blue Origin has so far fallen short of SpaceX, he does not talk about it publicly. Two moments on Tuesday, after his historic spaceflight, suggest he may not do a whole lot about it regardless.

Two hours after Bezos and his fellow passengers landed, they climbed onto a stage near the launch pad to receive their “astronaut” wings. The event, billed as a “press conference,” instead saw Blue Origin’s Ariane Cornell ask softball questions about the flight. The answers were interesting, and Bezos obviously took deep satisfaction from the event. At one point, he removed a necklace he had worn during the flight, got down from the stage, and put it around his mother’s neck. It seemed to be his way of telling his mom he had fulfilled his childhood dreams.

After all of that, Bezos allowed for just three actual press questions to be asked. Two came from TV networks and the other from Reuters. Only one of the questions got near the troubles at Blue Origin, asking about timelines for future rocket development. Bezos simply didn’t answer the question. He welcomes no public scrutiny of Blue Origin, and in doing so, he only invites more.

After the sham “press conference,” the four newly minted astronauts drove over to the landing site where the New Shepard rocket landed. It looked sooty and slightly worn in the midday sunshine, but it was no less brilliant for the wear-and-tear. New Shepard is a fine piece of engineering and a reasonable place for a launch company to start learning about spaceflight. The problem is that by beginning his company with a focus on space tourism and flying on the very first mission himself, Bezos only plays into the hands of critics. They might easily say Blue Origin is all about Bezos gratifying his spaceflight ambitions or about allowing a handful of wealthy tourists to reach a high-altitude vantage point for looking down on commoners.

Enlarge / Blue Origin CEO Bob Smith (black hat) walks with Jeff Bezos after his flight on Blue Origin’s New Shepard into space.
Joe Raedle/Getty Images



With New Shepard in the background, Bezos and the blue flight suit-clad astronauts posed for photographs. Near the end of the photo session, Bezos called out, “Hey Bob, come here. You should be in the photo, too.” At this invitation, a smiling Bob Smith emerged from a small group of onlookers and stood in the middle of the four people who had just gone into space. Cameras clicked.

This gesture by Bezos hardly seemed to be that of someone dissatisfied with the CEO of his rocket company.

After the photo opportunity, Bezos climbed behind the wheel of his Rivian truck and drove right onto the landing site, making a circle around the rocket, before roaring off into the hazy desert, bound for points unknown. Kind of like his rocket company.

EBAY EXECS TARGETED JOURNALISTS —

Lawsuit: eBay tried to “terrorize, stalk, and silence” couple that ran news site

Filing in bloody pig mask case says "morning shots of alcohol" were common at eBay.

JON BRODKIN - 7/21/2021, 1:30 PM

Enlarge / A bloody pig mask mailed to cyberstalking victims by then-eBay employees.

A former eBay security official who pleaded guilty for his role in a cyberstalking conspiracy has asked for leniency in sentencing while blaming his actions in part on a "drinking culture" at eBay that contributed to his alcoholism.

"eBay had a bar on campus that opened at 3:00 p.m., and drinking was part of the culture, with alcohol present throughout the office space where it was typical to take morning shots of alcohol with co-workers," a sentencing memorandum for 56-year-old defendant Philip Cooke said yesterday. It was filed in US District Court for the District of Massachusetts.

Cooke was senior manager of security operations for eBay's Global Security Team, making an annual salary of $185,000 when he played a role in the harassment of a couple that operated a news website. The harassment—in response to news coverage that eBay executives did not like—involved sending threatening messages and deliveries of live cockroaches, a funeral wreath, and a bloody pig mask to the couple's home in Natick, Massachusetts. Cooke was promoted by eBay to director of security operations and given a raise to $205,000 in June 2020, about 10 months after the cyberstalking campaign began and just before it became public.

Ex-CEO among defendants in suit against eBay

In addition to criminal charges, Cooke is one of the defendants in a lawsuit filed by the harassment victims today. Ina and David Steiner of Natick, who run news website EcommerceBytes, filed the complaint against eBay and the alleged perpetrators of the cyberstalking in the same US District Court. Defendants include eBay itself, former eBay CEO Devin Wenig; former eBay Chief Communications Officer Steven Wymer; and Progressive F.O.R.C.E Concepts (PFC), a security firm that employed Cooke as a contractor before he became a full-time eBay employee.

FURTHER READING  eBay execs sent roaches and “bloody pig mask” to harass journalists, feds say

"eBay... engaged in a coordinated effort to intimidate, threaten to kill, torture, terrorize, stalk and silence the Steiners, in order to stifle their reporting on eBay," the lawsuit alleged.

The lawsuit said that Wenig and Wymer:

provided the other Defendants with carte blanche authority to terminate the reporting of the Steiners by whatever means necessary, with Defendant Wymer expressing "... I want to see ashes. As long as it takes. Whatever it takes." Defendant Wymer promised the defendants he would "embrace managing any bad fallout" if the plan went south, further directing, "We need to STOP her." All of the horrific, vicious and sickening conduct that followed was committed by employees of eBay and PFC, while acting in the scope of their employment under the authority of and for the benefit of eBay and PFC.

Wenig and Wymer were not hit with criminal charges when other eBay employees were arrested and charged last year.

The Steiners' lawsuit said:

Starting with an online intimidation campaign, the defendants taunted Ina Steiner using a phony Twitter handle pretending to be an eBay seller, and directly threatened her to stop reporting on eBay. The online attacks continued to escalate into threatening and disturbing package deliveries, which included live spiders, cockroaches, a bloody pig mask, a funeral wreath, and a book entitled "Grief Diaries: Surviving Loss of a Spouse" sent directly to David Steiner. These messages and deliveries often were accompanied by ominous simultaneous Twitter messages such as "do I have your attention now, cunt?" Shockingly graphic and vulgar messages, such as "U are sick motha fuckers…and every one will kno! U fuckin cunt ass bitch!" paired with taunting emails and deliveries, including pornography and "Hustler: Barely Legal" magazines sent to the Steiner's neighbors' home in David Steiner's name, to defame the Steiners and attempt to disgrace them and tarnish their reputation within their community.

Some of the conspirators traveled from California to Massachusetts and, among other things, "menacingly stalked and tailed the Steiners in a black van and other rental vehicles, repeatedly circling the block, tracking their every move, and following David Steiner when he left the residence. The defendants even went as far as to attempt to break into the Steiner garage in order to install a GPS tracking device on their vehicle," the lawsuit said.

eBay issued a statement last year that said an "internal investigation found that, while Mr. Wenig's communications were inappropriate, there was no evidence that he knew in advance about or authorized the actions that were later directed toward the blogger and her husband."

eBay provided a statement to Ars today, saying, "The misconduct of these former employees was wrong, and we will do what is fair and appropriate to try to address what the Steiners went through. The events from 2019 should never have happened, and as eBay expressed to the Steiners, we are very sorry for what they endured. As noted by the US Attorney's Office when this matter first came to light, eBay cooperated fully with the government's investigation, noting that 'eBay was extremely cooperative with the investigation in helping state and federal authorities figure out what had happened and collect evidence of the crime.'"

eBay “culture” exacerbated alcohol problem

Cooke's sentencing memorandum quotes his wife as saying that a "drinking culture at eBay" exacerbated an alcohol abuse problem that got worse after Cooke retired from a career as a captain in the Santa Clara Police Department. Cooke went to work for Progressive F.O.R.C.E Concepts about a year after retiring from police work, and "while the job provided a place to go, a purpose, and new colleagues, it did not resolve his drinking problem." After taking a full-time job at eBay in April 2019, Cooke "continued to drink heavily, especially with his friends and colleagues." That was a few months before the cyberstalking campaign began.

"When he returned to eBay as an employee, Phil's drinking problem became even worse," his wife said in the memorandum. "I remember one time Phil didn't come home from work until around 4am the following day. When I asked him where he had been, he said he closed down a bar with his coworkers and slept in his car for a few hours until he felt safe to drive home. I knew Phil and his coworkers had a liquor cabinet at work, but what I didn't know until later was they were taking shots of alcohol in the morning."

Cooke's filing asked the court for a sentence of "home confinement for whatever period the Court believes is necessary, 12 months supervised release, a $200 special assessment, no restitution (as none has been requested), and no fine."

The filing went on:


As a result of this prosecution, Mr. Cooke has endured extensive punishment already... He lost a job he enjoyed, was devastated by the disappointment he caused his family, and was humiliated in his community—a community he honorably and faithfully served [as a police officer] for 30 years. He has accepted full responsibility for his misconduct, is very remorseful for his bad choices, and wants to do whatever it takes to put his life right. Since accepting responsibility, he has addressed his substance abuse issue, remained sober, and successfully trained to facilitate meetings in a substance abuse program in California for both other substance abusers and also for their friends and families.

The document downplays Cooke's role in the conspiracy, saying that he didn't travel to Massachusetts and that he warned fellow employees against some of the worst parts of the plan. The filing said:

While Mr. Cooke joined the plan to engage in a "white knight strategy" to send harassing and anonymous Twitter messages to soften up the victims for eBay's security team's assistance, and viewed at least some draft messages in connection with that scheme, he was not personally involved in two or more separate "instances" of harassing the same victim. His involvement is more fairly described as a single "course of conduct" or "a pattern of conduct comprised of 2 or more acts evidencing a continuity of purpose pattern of activity."

Guilty pleas by five ex-eBay employees

Cooke pleaded guilty in October 2020 to one count of conspiracy to commit cyberstalking and one count of conspiracy to commit witness tampering. Each charge carries a maximum sentence of five years in prison, three years of supervised release, a fine of up to $250,000, and restitution.

Four other former eBay security employees pleaded guilty in October 2020. They are Brian Gilbert, former senior manager of special operations for eBay's Global Security Team; Stephanie Stockwell, former manager of eBay's Global Intelligence Center; Stephanie Popp, eBay's former senior manager of Global Intelligence; and Veronica Zea, a former eBay contractor who was an intelligence analyst in eBay Global Intelligence. Like Cooke, all four pleaded guilty to charges of conspiracy to commit cyberstalking and conspiracy to tamper with witnesses and are waiting to be sentenced.

While the harassment case involves only eBay, the sentencing memorandum noted a similar drinking culture at Facebook.

"I did not know about the drinking culture at eBay and Facebook," Cooke's wife said in a statement quoted in the memorandum. "First, he worked as a contractor for eBay which has a bar on campus where he would drink with his coworkers. They would often leave that bar and go over to a local bar/restaurant and continue drinking until late at night. Then he started working at Facebook where they allowed drinking during the day and would often have free alcohol available."

Crime and attempted cover-up

In June 2020, the US Department of Justice announced the cyberstalking charges, saying the harassment campaign "included sending the couple anonymous, threatening messages, disturbing deliveries—including a box of live cockroaches, a funeral wreath, and a bloody pig mask—and conducting covert surveillance of the victims."

"It is alleged that in August 2019, after the newsletter published an article about litigation involving eBay, two members of eBay's executive leadership team sent or forwarded text messages suggesting that it was time to 'take down' the newsletter's editor," the DOJ announcement said at the time. Another message from one eBay executive to another allegedly said, "we are going to crush this lady," referring to Ina Steiner.

The executives were unnamed in court documents at the time but identified in news reports as Wenig and Wymer, with Wymer sending the "we are going to crush this lady" message. In another text, Wenig allegedly told Wymer to "take her down."

A Department of Justice release issued after Cooke's guilty plea explained his role in planning and trying to cover up the strange stalking campaign against the Steiners.

"As part of the second phase of the campaign, some of the defendants allegedly sent private Twitter messages and public tweets criticizing the newsletter's content and threatening to visit the victims in Natick," the DOJ said. Cooke and other eBay security employees "planned these messages to become increasingly disturbing, culminating with 'doxing' the victims (i.e., publishing their home address)," the DOJ said. Charging documents "alleged that the same group intended then to have Gilbert, a former Santa Clara police captain, approach the victims with an offer to help stop the harassment that the defendants were secretly causing, in an effort to promote good will towards eBay."

The DOJ also alleged that "Cooke and several of the other defendants discussed the possibility of presenting Natick Police with a false investigative lead to keep the police from discovering video evidence that could link some of the deliveries to eBay employees. As the police and eBay's lawyers continued to investigate, the defendants allegedly deleted digital evidence that showed their involvement, further obstructing what had by then become a federal investigation."Advertisement

“Involved in every aspect”

A Silicon Valley Voice article last year stated:

Although Cooke didn't do any of the dirty work himself, he's alleged to have been involved in every aspect of the conspiracy from the harassing tweets and messages directed at the victims, to generating ideas for a series of creatively revolting deliveries—including live cockroaches and pornography—to physically stalking the victims, to the attempted cover up in which the pair discussed using Santa Clara police officers.

In a text to Gilbert, Cooke seemed to approve details of the plan to mislead police investigators. "Copy all. Good plan and cover. Brian, important to be convincing so they don't start looking to find video of who purchased the gift cards," the text said, according to the Silicon Valley Voice article. Those gift cards were used to send the pig masks and other deliveries to the Natick couple. Cooke's text also advised finding "a friendly" contact in the local police department.
Cooke “warned” against parts of the plan

Cooke's sentencing memorandum claimed that "Cooke did not know or understand that he had any authority or responsibility whatsoever to 'approve' any of the messages that were sent to the victims," that he suggested changes to a message to "tone it down," and that he "warned the group that they should not proceed" with parts of the plan, such as publishing the victims' address.

In a meeting on August 6, 2019, Cooke "told the group that in California, the messages could not be threatening, and if the victims said 'stop,' the messages had to stop," the memorandum said. "When surveillance was discussed, Mr. Cooke told the group it was dangerous and that they should contact a Massachusetts private investigator and not undertake surveillance themselves." Cooke also warned them that the use of GPS tracking devices was "illegal in California and possibly illegal in Massachusetts and suggested contacting a Massachusetts private investigator to find out," the court document said.

Cooke left for a trip to Asia, Europe, and the Middle East on August 8, 2019.

"While overseas where he was traveling alone, Mr. Cooke drank heavily," the sentencing memorandum said. "On August 20, 2019, while in India, Mr. Cooke saw and responded to a draft Twitter message from Gilbert, to which he acquiesced with a 'thumbs up emoji' and later assented to a plan to use multiple accounts to send the message string with a 'copy all.'"

At this time, "Cooke was unaware that his coconspirators had attempted surveillance in Massachusetts," and he was not aware that colleagues "might have engaged in role play at the victims' house" or "directed creation of fake person-of-interest reports to conceal their activities," the memorandum said.

The memorandum added:


Mr. Cooke often found the information he did receive incredible, not believing that [Senior Director of Safety & Security James] Baugh would actually direct and that others participate in the activities described. Mr. Cooke regularly deleted messages from Baugh because so many of them were entirely inappropriate for the workplace and because he believed Baugh was "messing with him." In his few months at eBay, Mr. Cooke had received inappropriate and false messages from Baugh, and he had difficulty distinguishing which ones were serious.

Baugh is one of the defendants in the case filed by the Steiners and is facing criminal charges.

Steiners suffered “permanent psychological trauma”

The Steiners' lawsuit said the couple now suffers from "permanent psychological trauma and damage" because of the cyberstalking. The complaint asked for financial damages, saying that because of "the threats and intimidation and the wire and mail fraud, the Steiners feared for their lives and the conspiracy has hampered their ability to continue at the same level, causing them significant economic damage."

The Steiners' lawsuit also says their reputation was damaged. "The various online accounts created by defendants in order to send anonymous tweets and direct Twitter messages left readers and advertisers with the impression that plaintiffs' news coverage of eBay was biased and unfair," the lawsuit said. "Thus, plaintiffs' reputation as objective and impartial journalists and editors and the standing of EcommerceBytes as an unbiased trade publication, suffered as a direct result of defendants' acts."

GET A BLACKBERRY ITS ENCRYPTED

An explosive spyware report shows limits of iOS, Android security

Amnesty International sheds alarming light on an NSO Group surveillance tool.

LILY HAY NEWMAN, WIRED.COM - 7/24/2021

Enlarge / A report this week indicates that the problem of high-caliber spyware is far more widespread than previously feared.
Pau Barrena | Getty Images


The shadowy world of private spyware has long caused alarm in cybersecurity circles, as authoritarian governments have repeatedly been caught targeting the smartphones of activists, journalists, and political rivals with malware purchased from unscrupulous brokers. The surveillance tools these companies provide frequently target iOS and Android, which have seemingly been unable to keep up with the threat. But a new report suggests the scale of the problem is far greater than feared—and has placed added pressure on mobile tech makers, particularly Apple, from security researchers seeking remedies.

This week, an international group of researchers and journalists from Amnesty International, Forbidden Stories, and more than a dozen other organizations published forensic evidence that a number of governments worldwide—including Hungary, India, Mexico, Morocco, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates—may be customers of the notorious Israeli spyware vendor NSO Group. The researchers studied a leaked list of 50,000 phone numbers associated with activists, journalists, executives, and politicians who were all potential surveillance targets. They also looked specifically at 37 devices infected with, or targeted by, NSO's invasive Pegasus spyware. They even created a tool so you can check whether your iPhone has been compromised.

NSO Group called the research “false allegations by a consortium of media outlets” in a strongly worded denial on Tuesday. An NSO Group spokesperson said, "The list is not a list of Pegasus targets or potential targets. The numbers in the list are not related to NSO Group in any way. Any claim that a name in the list is necessarily related to a Pegasus target or potential target is erroneous and false.” On Wednesday, NSO Group said it would no longer respond to media inquiries.

NSO Group isn’t the only spyware vendor out there, but it has the highest profile. WhatsApp sued the company in 2019 over what it claims were attacks on over a thousand of its users. And Apple’s BlastDoor feature, introduced in iOS 14 earlier this year, was an attempt to cut off “zero-click exploits,” attacks that don't require any taps or downloads from victims. The protection appears not to have worked as well as intended; the company released a patch for iOS to address the latest round of alleged NSO Group hacking on Tuesday.

In the face of the report, many security researchers say that both Apple and Google can and should do more to protect their users against these sophisticated surveillance tools

“It definitely shows challenges in general with mobile device security and investigative capabilities these days," says independent researcher Cedric Owens. “I also think seeing both Android and iOS zero-click infections by NSO shows that motivated and resourced attackers can still be successful despite the amount of control Apple applies to its products and ecosystem

Tensions have long simmered between Apple and the security community over limits on researchers’ ability to conduct forensic investigations on iOS devices and deploy monitoring tools. More access to the operating system would potentially help catch more attacks in real time, allowing researchers to gain a deeper understanding of how those attacks were constructed in the first place. For now, security researchers rely on a small set of indicators within iOS, plus the occasional jailbreak. And while Android is more open by design, it also places limits on what’s known as “observability.” Effectively combating high-caliber spyware like Pegasus, some researchers say, would require things like access to read a device's filesystem, the ability to examine which processes are running, access to system logs, and other telemetry.

A lot of criticism has centered on Apple in this regard, because the company has historically offered stronger security protections for its users than the fragmented Android ecosystem.

“The truth is that we are holding Apple to a higher standard precisely because they're doing so much better,” says SentinelOne principal threat researcher Juan Andres Guerrero-Saade. “Android is a free-for-all. I don't think anyone expects the security of Android to improve to a point where all we have to worry about are targeted attacks with zero-day exploits.”

In fact, the Amnesty International researchers say they actually had an easier time finding and investigating indicators of compromise on Apple devices targeted with Pegasus malware than on those running stock Android.

“In Amnesty International’s experience there are significantly more forensic traces accessible to investigators on Apple iOS devices than on stock Android devices, therefore our methodology is focused on the former," the group wrote in a lengthy technical analysis of its findings on Pegasus. “As a result, most recent cases of confirmed Pegasus infections have involved iPhones.”

Some of the focus on Apple also stems from the company’s own emphasis on privacy and security in its product design and marketing.

“Apple is trying, but the problem is they aren't trying as hard as their reputation would imply,” says Johns Hopkins University cryptographer Matthew Green.

Even with its more open approach, though, Google faces similar criticisms about the visibility security researchers can get into its mobile operating system.

“Android and iOS have different types of logs. It's really hard to compare them,” says Zuk Avraham, CEO of the analysis group ZecOps and a longtime advocate of access to mobile system information. “Each one has an advantage, but they are both equally not sufficient and enable threat actors to hide.”

Apple and Google both appear hesitant to reveal more of the digital forensic sausage-making, though. And while most independent security researchers advocate for the shift, some also acknowledge that increased access to system telemetry would aid bad actors as well.

"While we understand that persistent logs would be more helpful for forensic uses such as the ones described by Amnesty International’s researchers, they also would be helpful to attackers,” a Google spokesperson said in a statement to WIRED. “We continually balance these different needs.”

Ivan Krstić, head of Apple security engineering and architecture, said in a statement that “Apple unequivocally condemns cyberattacks against journalists, human rights activists, and others seeking to make the world a better place. For over a decade, Apple has led the industry in security innovation and, as a result, security researchers agree the iPhone is the safest, most secure consumer mobile device on the market. Attacks like the ones described are highly sophisticated, cost millions of dollars to develop, often have a short shelf life, and are used to target specific individuals. While that means they are not a threat to the overwhelming majority of our users, we continue to work tirelessly to defend all our customers, and we are constantly adding new protections for their devices and data.”

The trick is to strike the right balance between offering more system indicators without inadvertently making attackers’ jobs too much easier. “There is a lot that Apple could be doing in a very safe way to allow observation and imaging of iOS devices in order to catch this type of bad behavior, yet that does not seem to be treated as a priority,” says iOS security researcher Will Strafach. “I am sure they have fair policy reasons for this, but it’s something I don’t agree with and would love to see changes in this thinking.”

Thomas Reed, director of Mac and mobile platforms at the antivirus maker Malwarebytes, says he agrees that more insight into iOS would benefit user defenses. But he adds that allowing special, trusted monitoring software would come with real risks. He points out that there are already suspicious and potentially unwanted programs on macOS that antivirus can't fully remove because the operating system endows them with this special type of system trust, potentially in error. The same problem of rogue system analysis tools would almost inevitably crop up on iOS as well.

“We also see nation-state malware all the time on desktop systems that gets discovered after several years of undetected deployment," Reed adds. “And that's on systems where there are already many different security solutions available. Many eyes looking for this malware is better than few. I just worry about what we’d have to trade for that visibility."

The Pegasus Project, as the consortium of researchers call the new findings, underscore the reality that Apple and Google are unlikely to solve the threat posed by private spyware vendors alone. The scale and reach of the potential Pegasus targeting indicates that a global ban on private spyware may be necessary.

“A moratorium on the trade in intrusion software is the bare minimum for a credible response—mere triage,” NSA surveillance whistleblower Edward Snowden tweeted on Tuesday in reaction to the Pegasus Project findings. “Anything less and the problem gets worse.”

On Monday, Amazon Web Services took its own step by shutting down cloud infrastructure linked to NSO.

Regardless of what happens to NSO Group in particular, or the private surveillance market in general, user devices are still ultimately where clandestine targeted attacks from any source will play out. Even if Google and Apple can’t be expected to solve the problem themselves, they need to keep working on a better way forward.

This story originally appeared on wired.com.

Tokyo 2020: IOC claims Games to be gender-balanced, 

but equality is not so simple

Tokyo is to be the most gender-balanced Olympics yet, but the participation of women in sports is not evenly distributed throughout the globe. In which countries are women more likely to succeed in elite-level sports?

Women have been winning more medals than their share in Jamaica’s Olympic teams. In 2021, Shelly-Ann Fraser-Pryce will look to add to a personal collection that already boasts two golds, three silvers and one bronze.


"The Olympic Games Tokyo 2020 will be the first gender-balanced Olympic Games in history with 48.8% women’s participation," International Olympic Committee (IOC) President Thomas Bach trumpeted in a statement back in March.

He went on to stress that "the IOC is sending another extremely strong message to the world that gender balance is a reality at the Olympic Games."

It is a milestone that has been a long time coming, particularly in light of the fact that, when women started competing at the games in 1900, they made up just 23 of roughly 1,000 athletes.

China will be leading the way with a record-breaking 69% of women in their 433-person team. Other Olympic powers trail behind, but over half of the competing nations, including the top nine in the final medal standings at the 2016 Summer Olympics, are sending teams made up of nearly 50% women to Tokyo.


Gender equality is not only about fitting in as many women as possible: It's also about allowing them to perform on equal footing and giving them as much of a chance of winning as their male counterparts.

In which countries do women athletes stand as good a chance of winning medals as their male counterparts? In which countries is this still not the case? To find out, DW analyzed medal counts and team composition numbers provided by Olympedia, a website maintained by a group of Olympic historians and statisticians.
The overperformers

Usain Bolt left everyone speechless in 2008, breaking world records and making the word "Jamaica" a synonym for speed. However, he was the only man to win medals for the Caribbean country in Beijing. Of Jamaica's 11 medals, nine were won by women.

One day after Bolt's triumph, Shelly-Ann Fraser-Pryce, considered the fastest woman alive, also won the 100-meter race. She was joined on the podium by two other women from Jamaica, a country where female athletes have historically tended to outperform their male counterparts.

Jamaica's Shelly-Ann Fraser-Pryce celebrates after winning the women's 100-meter final at the 2019 IAAF World Athletics Championships

Assuming that athletes of both genders have similar capabilities and access to resources, it's fair to expect that women should make up around 50% of the athletes in a nation's Olympic team. That being the case, it's also fair to assume that they should win around 50% of their country's medals — even with minor caveats such as group sports and mixed-gender events.

In 2008, the 27 women athletes accounted for 54% of Jamaica's 50-person team, but won 82% of the country's 11 medals.

Jamaica is just one country in which women tend to bring home more medals than their team's gender composition would suggest.

Australians have produced great female swimmers, including the likes of Shane Gould, who won five of her country's 17 medals in Munich in 1972. Ethiopian women dominate long-distance running. The Dutch are excellent cyclers and swimmers. And then there is Romania, perhaps the most successful country in terms of female Olympians.


Romanian women have consistently outperformed their male counterparts since the 1970s — at first, largely because of the country's gymnastics teams, led by Nadia Comaneci, who at the 1976 Olympic Games in Montreal became the first athlete to score a perfect 10.

"From 10 iconic Olympic athletes, eight are women and two are men," says the head of the international department at the Romanian Olympic Committee, Kristian Butariu.

Butariu says socioeconomic factors are behind this reversed gender gap, noting that sport provides a less-stable career path than most pursuits.

"While women go professional, men usually feel responsible for providing for the family, so they need, in their minds, a moneymaking occupation," Butariu says.

His view might illustrate how Romanian society sees gender and sport today, but there's another possible explanation: The country was part of the Eastern bloc for over 40 years, at a time when Communist-ruled countries, in particular, saw the Olympics as a potential platform for propaganda.

At age 14, Nadia Comaneci won three gold medals and scored the first perfect 10 in the history of Olympic gymnastics. She helped cement a legacy of female victories in Romanian sports that lasts to this day.

"Female sports were also a political opportunity to present the political superiority of their own systems," says Anke Hilbrenne, a historian who researches gender and sports at Georg-August University in Göttingen, Germany.

According to her, it was important for Communist rhetoric to emphasize a perceived equality between men and women, and the Olympics were the perfect vehicle to do so. Countries such as Czechoslovakia, the Soviet Union and East Germany were indeed places where women outperformed their male counterparts, just as Romania still is. However, a negative example comes from a country with a similar ideology.
The underperformers

Mireya Luis is regarded by many as the best volleyball player of all time. She won three Olympic gold medals with Cuba between 1992 and 2000, but her legacy has not lived on. The once dreaded Cuban volleyball team has not qualified for the Games since 2008.

Cuba's context is different from other countries. Despite economic restrictions due to the US-imposed embargo, a population of just 11.3 million, and high desertion numbers among athletes, it sits in an impressive 18th place in the all-time medal count.

Currently, most medals come in boxing, a national passion that the Cuban regime doesn't regard as appropriate for females, meaning only the men are allowed to compete. Women often bring home medals in judo and taekwondo, but the country's obsession is off-limits for them.

There are similar hurdles in other countries where women tend to punch below their weight.

Iran's national sport is wrestling, but the country has never sent a female wrestler to the games. Uzbekistan's men consistently win medals in boxing and weightlifting, but a bronze in gymnastics is the only medal ever won by a female athlete from the country.

Sprinter Farzaneh Fasihi is one of the 11 Iranian women who will compete in Tokyo, making up 16% of their national team. None will compete in wrestling, Iran’s national sport and main medal-winning discipline.

Not all disparities can be explained by social conservatism, though. Brazil women consistently win fewer medals than one might expect based on the percentage of the national team they make up. This is despite the country's generally felt pride in female icons such as gymnast Daiane dos Santos or footballer Marta.

The same is true of the otherwise progressive country Sweden — even though there have been more Swedish women than men competing in the Olympics since 2008.

The powerhouses

At the final of the gymnastics event in Rio in 2016, American star Simone Biles took the stage to the sound of "Mas Que Nada," an iconicsambacomposition that had the spectators singing along to her floor routine.

As soon as she left the spotlight, Biles was embraced by her teammates. They had just won gold for the United States. Soon they would be sharing the podium with the Russian and Chinese teams.

This competition encapsulates how the Summer Olympics have been playing out since 1996, when Russia and China replaced the Soviet Union as the main rivals of the United States in the medal race. Female athletes are a significant part of these countries' successes.

At Rio, Russian and American women made up roughly 50% of their teams and brought home nearly an equal share of medals. Similarly, Chinese women made up about 60% of their team and won a proportional number of medals.

"The countries that want to be at the top of the medal count recognized they can't do that unless both their men and women win medals," says Michele Donnelly, a sports management researcher at Brock University in St. Catharines, Ontario, Canada."

Olympic success doesn't point to a level playing field and it may even hide systemic problems, with US gymnastics being a prime example. Two years after the Rio Games, four of the five team members came forward with allegations that they had been sexually abused by staffers from USA Gymnastics.

"Those women have gone consistently to the Olympics and won medals. That is not in itself evidence of gender equality. It's a success despite gender inequality," says Donnelly. "We have to go deeper to see the conditions under which those women are competing."

Still, in 2021, women compete in fewer events and are awarded fewer medals than men. Clothing regulations are stricter for women than their male counterparts. Pierre Coubertin, the father of the modern Olympic Games, was an opponent of female participation in the very event he envisioned back in 1896.

According to Donnelly, significant advances are being made, but this sexist legacy still affects women athletes and continues to hinder the pursuit of true equality.

GERMANY

Showing solidarity after the floods: People helping people

In an emergency, immediate help is double the help. After disastrous floods hit western Germany, volunteers have come from near and far to help with clean up efforts.

Volunteers help in clean up efforts in Simbach western Germany


Volunteers need help and their machines need fuel. That's why Thomas Sperber and Marius Gläser got into their tanker truck at four in the morning from Limburg, which lies roughly an hour southeast of the flood-hit Ahr Valley.

Roughly 32,000 liters of diesel slosh around in the tanks behind the driver's cabin, donated by 17 oil traders from Limburg and the surrounding area. They've put the word out on Facebook that they want to distribute it free of charge to everyone in the flooded area who is operating excavators and tractors, to trucks and buses that operate emergency power generators and pumps.

When they opened their improvised fueling station in a parking lot in Remagen not far from Sinzig, which was badly hit by the flood, Rasim Cervidaku is one of the first "customers" to roll up with his wheel loader and three empty barrels. The landscape gardener from Sinzig has been working almost non-stop with his work tool since the flood disaster a week ago.

He was lucky, he told DW, because his house and business were located on higher ground and were not affected. Nevertheless, it was very clear to him and his family that they want to support the flood victims with all they have. His son is taking part in the clean-up work with the company's own excavator.

Private individuals are providing assistance after catastrophic floods in Ahr

People amazed at outpouring of help

"The greatest help is provided by the local people," observed the Berlin disaster researcher Martin Voss. "First of all, from those who are not yet so affected so that they can still do something: They lend a hand."

Solidarity is the slogan of the hour in the flooded areas. The solidarity, the willingness to help is enormous, as too is the effort put into going beyond the state or organizations to get involved.

Many, who otherwise perceive people as selfish and competitive, are amazed at the huge wave of helpfulness. However, research has shown for decades that people in disaster situations genuinely show solidarity, says Martin Voss of DW. "At the moment when people get into this kind of emergency, the primary behavior clearly becomes being their for another."

It doesn't always have to go as far as Hubert Schilles did. The man in his mid-sixties from an hour west in the Eifel region had unblocked the drain of a dam with his 30 ton excavator, risking his life in the process. He saved more than 10,000 people directly affected by a possible dam breach.

Martin Voss, disaster researcher at the Free University in Berlin

A 300 kilometer journey - with an excavator

Karsten Steiner is also a man of the hour. The strong man sits at the wheel of his heavy excavator in Sinzig. The gripper arms first lift a Mercedes limousine that has been totaled to the side. Then they reach into the mud again and a mound of garbage piled meters high on the side of the road and heave the debris into a waiting truck.

Three days after the disaster, Steiner had driven his excavator onto his low-loader nearly 300 kilometers north of here to help, at his own expense. When asked the loss of earnings, Steiner only replies: "Look around: the people here are much worse off than me." Then, unmoved, he clears a piece of the road again. Steiner wants to help out in Sinzig for a few more days.

"The doers are the real heroes in this situation," says disaster researcher, Wolf Dombrowsky. "Those who get started right away and get things done. And the best are also those who coordinate and divide up the tasks, telling the others 'you do this, you do that.'"

The Bremen-based disaster researcher emphasizes how much the normal competitive mechanisms in society are overridden in a disaster situation. "Here the people are stripped of everything. And anyone who helps is a hero."

Volunteers help deal with the aftermath of the floods in Ahr, western Germany

Out of service fire trucks reactivated

Max Diron is one of these heroes. The man in his late twenties drives up to the free refueling campaign in the town of Remagen in an old private fire truck. Diron deals with these types of vintage vehicles up the road in Bonn. The all-wheel drive vehicles are popular as motorhomes with people who want to travel to remote mountain regions off the beaten path.

Now Diron's home region in the Ahr Valley has been affected by the floods and the old fire engines are suddenly back on a rescue mission. The classic car dealer had already been carrying out rescue operations on the night of the disaster. "My mother-in-law called me at 3.30 a.m.," he says.

He now sets out every afternoon at around 5 p.m. with a group of fellow volunteers for what he calls "after-work help." Brooms, shovels, wheelbarrows, rubber boats and whatever else is needed in the crisis area, plus plenty of motivation.

"We have already finished 12 houses," says Diron. And notes that his old fire engines could also cope with roads in which the more modern trucks fromthe technical relief organization, THW, got stuck. Which is why he wants to drive his "after-work help" crew with an emergency power generator and water pump to particularly isolated villages this afternoon.

A group of volunteers pose in front of a fire truck in Ahr, a town severely affected by the floods

Taking the shuttle bus to the relief effort

Public buses have also started shuttling up to 1,000 volunteers to the area every day starting at 7 a.m. Organizer Marc Ulrich from Bad-Neuenahr-Ahrweiler, which was badly affected, quickly realized after the disaster that many people want to help. To avoid traffic chaos that could prevent rescue and evacuation vehicles from getting through, he launched a plan to use shuttle buses and put the word out on Facebook.

On the trips to the mission, the volunteers are briefed on the situation. "Do not go into empty houses uninvited," is one of the guidelines, or "Listen to people when they want to talk. But don't start a conversation with them."

Volunteers clear mud from the roads in Bad Neuenahr in western Germany

When the willingness to help wears off

Ulrich worries how long people will be so willing to help and other issues will soon displace this disaster.

Dombrowsky also expects private aid operations to decline. "The people who go there and help mostly have jobs. They have families, children, relatives. And this wonderful feeling of being a much needed hero and being enormously useful will reach a saturation point. And then comes the feeling, that I have to go back to work or my family needs me too. Or that my strength is waning."

At that point, at least, the professional aid effort has to step up, says Dombrowsky. "But then even the worst is over and spontaneous help is no longer necessary." That's when the reconstruction phase begins.

This article has been adapted from German.

Opinion: 

The Cuban authorities are afraid of us

The real Cuba has moved even further away from the country propagated by the authorities and in the state-run media. The anger on the streets is growing, says Cuban blogger and government critic Yoani Sánchez.

Will Cubans eventually get the freedoms they're fighting for?

No one in the queue speaks. A woman looks down at her shoes, while a young man drums his fingers on the wall.

Some time has passed since Cubans took to the streets in a protest unprecedented in the last 62 years, and the outrage is still very palpable. As images of police brutality, more testimonies from mothers whose children have been missing since the protests started, and videos of militarized cities emerge, popular anger grows.

Anyone who wasn't aware of the situation of the island before that historic date might say that the authorities have managed to bring the situation under control and that calm has returned to the streets of Cuba. In reality, however, this apparent lull is nothing but fear, anger and pain. In Havana, the tension can be felt in the air. Everywhere you look there are police, military units and pro-government civilians brandishing improvized clubs.

Fear spreads at home and through the streets

Yoani Sanchez is a Cuban blogger and columnist

Inside the houses, unease is growing and tears are flowing. Thousands of families are looking for someone in the police stations; others are waiting for the uniformed officers to knock on their door to take away a relative suspected of having taken part in the protests.

New unrest has broken out in various parts of the country, with reports of beatings and gunfire by special forces, the dreaded "black wasps," an elite unit of the armed forces. Numerous independent journalists have been arrested, others are under house arrest, and internet access has been censored several times since the first protests broke out.

The citizens who were portrayed by the authorities as completely loyal to the system, docile and peaceful no longer exist. People have found their voices of protest, some loud and some muffled. And it is impossible to predict exactly when they will be heard again.

The real Cuba has become even more distant from the country propagated in the official media. While the former feels that it has recovered its civic voice, has tested its strength in the streets, and demanded freedom vociferously, the state-controlled media speak of foreign conspiracies; of isolated groups demonstrating, and of criminals vandalizing shops and markets.

Watch video 01:55 Cuba is suffering under US embargo

Is civil war looming?

The two narratives are mutually exclusive and will not be able to coexist for long. Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel has tried to put into perspective the comments he uttered at the beginning of the protests, when news of more protests came practically every hour.

"The order to fight has been given," and "we are ready for anything," he threatened at the time. The specter of civil war hovered over the island. Now, he uses terms like "harmony," "peace," and "joy," but those saccharine phrases ring hollow in the face of hundreds of buses rolling up across the country to unload military units in squares and neighborhoods.

So far, the only measure announced to defuse the protests has been to lift the restrictions on travelers bringing medicine, food and hygiene items to the island. But that's seen as too little, too late after years of demands. For many, it's merely a breadcrumb in the face of calls for social change and the resignation of key political figures to start the transition to democracy as soon as possible.

"Freedom doesn't fit in a suitcase," many have warned on social media — just as a rebellion isn't stopped by a police shield. "We were so hungry that we ate our fear," is another ubiquitous message.

But now we're so angry that they're the ones who fear us — and it shows.

This piece has been translated from German

NOT TO BE DISNEY MOVIE

Baby orca dies in New Zealand after fruitless search for mother

Issued on: 23/07/2021 - 

A baby orca named Toa became front-page news in New Zealand when he washed ashore near the capital Wellington after becoming separated from his pod 

Marty MELVILLE AFP/File

Wellington (AFP)

Toa, the baby orca who captured hearts after he was found stranded in New Zealand waters, has lost his fight for survival, conservationists confirmed Saturday.

The killer whale, less than 2.5 metres (eight feet) long and believed to be four to six months old, became front-page news when he washed ashore near the capital Wellington after becoming separated from his pod nearly two weeks ago.

He was unweaned, and hundreds of people volunteered to assist with round-the-clock care as he was unable to survive alone in the ocean.

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Conservationists, who named the orca Toa -- Maori for "warrior" -- housed him in a makeshift pen at the seaside suburb of Plimmerton, where he was fed via a special teat every four hours while an air and sea search was mounted to find his mother.

Whale Rescue, an organisation that had been helping care for Toa, posted on social media that his condition rapidly deteriorated on Friday night.

"Vets on site rushed to his aid but were unable to save him," the statement said.

Department of Conservation marine species manager Ian Angus said they were aware that the longer Toa was in captivity and away from his mother, the more likely it was his health would deteriorate.

"Toa passed quickly, surrounded by love with his last days made as comfortable as possible," Angus said.

"Throughout this amazing effort, we've all been united in wanting to do the best for Toa. Finding and reuniting him with his pod was still our goal as we headed into the weekend.

"This calf had captured hearts, and no one wanted to believe that he didn't have a fighting chance."

Despite being known as killer whales, orcas are actually the largest species of dolphin, with males growing up to nine metres.

Recognisable by their distinctive black and white markings, they are listed as critically endangered in New Zealand, where their population is estimated at 150-200.

Pods of orcas are relatively common in Wellington Harbour, where they have been observed hunting stingrays.

© 2021 AFP

COLOMBIA RETURNS TO DOPE DEALING
Colombia authorizes export of dried cannabis flowers


Issued on: 24/07/2021 - 

Colombian President Ivan Duque (L) visits the Clever Leaves company in Boyaca, Colombia on July 23, 2021 - Colombian Presidency/AFP

Bogota (AFP)

Colombia gave the green light Friday to export dried cannabis flowers for use in medical products in addition to allowing manufacturers to produce goods such as textiles or food containing the plant.

In a bold embrace of a booming global market, President Ivan Duque signed a decree ending "the ban on the export of dried flower" in an event organized at Clever Leaves, one of the 18 multinationals that grows medicinal cannabis in Colombia.

Colombia "is coming in as a major player in the international market" for cannabis, Duque said.

Colombia, the world's top producer of cocaine and which has major cannabis production, legalized the production of medical marijuana in 2016.

Until now, however, it was only allowed to export extracts of the plant, not its flowers.

Authorities had feared that exportation of the flowers would allow them to be diverted to the illegal side of the trade.

In a letter sent to Duque on July 14, the cannabis cultivation company Canamonte argued that a rule against exportation of the flowers prevented growers from "accessing the largest and most profitable market segment of the medical cannabis industry."

Flowers, which concentrate the plant's medicinal and psychoactive compounds, "may represent 53 percent of this market worldwide," according to Duque.

The new authorization also allows for the manufacture of "non-psychoactive derivatives" from the plant.

"We are no longer only in pharmaceutical use. We are opening the space to do much more in cosmetics... food and beverages" and even textiles, the president said.

Fabian Currea, Canamonte's director of cultivation, told AFP that ending the ban on exporting flowers "gives us the chance to explore new markets" and take advantage of the plant's low production costs in Colombia.#photo1

The rule also "helps control the informal market for fraudulent products" based on marijuana that has had a recent boom in Colombia, Currea said.

The government estimates that by 2024 the medical cannabis business could become a $64 billion industry.

Other countries in the region such as Uruguay, Ecuador and Peru have also legalized the production of marijuana for medicinal purposes.

© 2021 AFP

MEN IN POWER

US celebrity chefs to pay $600,000 settlement over sexual harassment

Issued on: 24/07/2021 - 

US celebrity chef Mario Batali -- seen exiting an arraignment hearing in Boston -- agreed to pay $600,000 to at least 20 former employees over sexual harassment accusations Joseph Prezioso AFP/File


New York (AFP)

US celebrity chefs Mario Batali and Joseph Bastianich agreed to pay $600,000 in a settlement to 20 former employees over sexual harassment allegations, the New York Attorney General said Friday.

A four-year investigation launched after accusations of sexual harassment were leveled against Batali concluded that "more than 20 employees were subjected to a hostile work environment in which female and male employees were sexually harassed by Batali, restaurant managers and other coworkers," said a statement from the attorney general's office.

"B&B, Batali and Bastianich must pay $600,000 to at least 20 former employees, revise training materials in all B&B restaurants, and submit biannual reports to the (Attorney General's office) to certify compliance with the agreement," the statement added.

The accusations were not the first against the once-prestigious Batali, known for his red ponytail and orange Croc shoes.

Earlier allegations led him to apologize publicly for making "many mistakes" and to take a sidelined role at his businesses, later selling his stake in all of his restaurants.

Batali had partnered with fellow popular chef Bastianich in several restaurants and they teamed up in the Batali and Bastianich Hospitality Group (B&B), which was dissolved in 2019.

The two men, regulars on TV cooking shows, had also created one of New York's temples to Italian cuisine, partnering with the chain of gargantuan Eataly food stores.

The agreement announced Friday implicated several of Batali and Bastianich's New York restaurants: Babbo, Lupa and Del Posto, which is now closed.

New York Attorney General Letitia James said in the statement that at their restaurants, "Batali and Bastianich permitted an intolerable work environment and allowed shameful behavior that is inappropriate in any setting."

Among the investigation findings detailed in the agreement, Batali had "sexually harassed a female server by making explicit comments to her and grabbing her hand... and pulling it towards his crotch" and in another incident showed a male server at Lupa an "unwelcome" pornographic video.

"Between 2016 to 2019, multiple employees witnessed or personally experienced unwanted sexual advances, inappropriate touching, and sexually explicit comments from managers and coworkers, and several female employees were forcibly groped, hugged, and/or kissed by male colleagues," the statement added.

AUSTRALIA
Anti-lockdown protesters clash with Sydney police

Issued on: 24/07/2021 - 

BRUCE COLD COCKS POLICE HORSE 

AFTER DOWNING A PINT OF FOSTERS

Several people were arrested at an anti-lockdown rally in Sydney which also saw violent clashes with police Steven SAPHORE AFP


Sydney (AFP)

Thousands of anti-lockdown protesters gathered in Australia's two largest cities on Saturday, with several arrested in Sydney after violent clashes with police.

A group charged mounted officers while throwing pot plants and bottles, as opponents of Sydney's month-long stay-at-home orders took to the streets.

In Melbourne, local media said thousands of protesters had thronged the streets after gathering outside the state parliament in the early afternoon.

Maskless demonstrators flouted rules on non-essential travel and public gatherings a day after authorities suggested restrictions could remain in place until October.

Police in Sydney said they had launched a "high-visibility policing operation" in response to the protest.

"So far during the operation, a number of people have been arrested," the force said.

Organisers had dubbed the protest a "freedom" rally and publicised it on social media pages frequently used to spread vaccine disinformation and conspiracy theories.#photo1

Attendees carried signs and banners reading "Wake up Australia" and "Drain the Swamp" -- echoing messages seen in similar demonstrations overseas.

Helicopters buzzed the streets above Sydney, a city of five million people that is struggling to contain an outbreak of the Delta variant.

Similar gatherings were planned in other urban centres.

The state of New South Wales, of which Sydney is the capital, reported 163 new cases Saturday for a total of nearly 2,000 infections in the current outbreak.

After escaping much of the early pandemic unscathed, around half of Australia's 25 million people are now in lockdown across several cities.

There is growing anger at the restrictions -- which are often only partially observed -- and the conservative government's failure to provide adequate vaccine supplies.

Just 11 percent of the population is fully vaccinated.

Stephen Jones, a member of the national parliament from Sydney, condemned the protesters as "selfish, reckless idiots".

"Nobody wants to be in lockdown. This is exactly how you keep it going."

Police said they supported "free speech and peaceful assembly, however, today's protest is in breach of the current COVID-19 Public Health Orders".

© 2021 AFP