Hack exposes law enforcement officers who signed up to join anti-government Oath Keepers


Will Carless, Grace Hauck and Erin Mansfield, USA TODAY
Sun, October 3, 2021, 

The law enforcement officers described what they could offer the Oath Keepers:

“I have a wide variety of law enforcement experience, including undercover operations, surveillance and SWAT,” one wrote on the membership application.

"Communications, Weapons, K9 Officer for local Sheriffs office 12 years to present," another wrote.

“​​I am currently working as a deputy sheriff in Texas,” a third typed.

These men, who had sworn to uphold the law, signed up to join an armed, extremist, anti-government group.

The Oath Keepers trade in conspiracy theories and wild interpretations of the U.S. Constitution. Its members have been involved in armed standoffs with the federal government. Some face charges in connection with their role in the insurrection at the Capitol on Jan. 6.

The statements are part of a massive trove of data hacked from the Oath Keepers website. The data, some of which the whistleblower group Distributed Denial of Secrets made available to journalists, includes a file that purportedly provides names, addresses, phone numbers and email addresses of almost 40,000 members.

A search of that list revealed more than 200 people who identified themselves as active or retired law enforcement officers when signing up. USA TODAY confirmed 20 of them are still serving, from Alabama to California. Another 20 have retired since joining the Oath Keepers.

One man who filled out the form claimed he was a federal police officer and worked for the Defense Intelligence Agency.

These men are probably a small fraction of the law enforcement officers who joined the militia over the years, since the majority of people listed did not volunteer information about their employment. The leaked data does not indicate whether the people on the list are dues-paying members.

Founded after the presidential election of Barack Obama in 2009 by Yale Law School graduate Stewart Rhodes, the Oath Keepers refuse to acknowledge the authority of the federal government. Members issue a conspiracy-laden declaration of orders they will refuse to enforce, including disarming the American people.

Stewart Rhodes, founder of the Oath Keepers, said weeks before the Capitol riot Jan. 6 that his group was "armed, prepared to go in if the president calls us up."

Rhodes has long claimed that the group, which experts said is the largest unauthorized militia in the country, is made up primarily of active and retired law enforcement officers and military personnel.

Just one Oath Keeper serving in a police or sheriff's department is too many, said Daryl Johnson, a security consultant and former senior analyst for domestic terrorism at the Department of Homeland Security.

“The Oath Keepers subscribe to anti-government conspiracy theories, so the fact that officers belong to an organization that believes in this type of stuff really calls into question their discretion and their ability to make sound judgments,” Johnson said.

Jan. 6 prosecutions: Oath Keepers had ‘corrupt’ intent when they stormed Capitol, DOJ says as defendants seek case dismissal

Guilty plea: Fourth suspected Oath Keeper pleads guilty to Capitol riot conspiracy, obstruction

More concerning is the fact that the Oath Keepers make their members swear an oath of allegiance, much like the police and military, Johnson said. That creates a dangerous conflict of interest.

“They look at the U.S. government as an enemy,” he said. “When it comes down to a crisis situation or an investigation involving other militias, where is this person’s allegiance? Most likely with the Oath Keepers and not the police department.”

Scott Dunn, who left the Oath Keepers board of directors in 2019 after disagreements with Rhodes, said the group's membership form asked people to list their relevant skills.

Rhodes "wanted to use that information as a searchable database, so we could punch in Oklahoma, and it would show us all the different specialties around Oklahoma, or we could search for a specific type of skill, and it would show which members had that skill," he said.

James Holsinger, a lieutenant with the Washington County Sheriff’s Office in Maryland, is on the list. Holsinger is running for sheriff in the county, where Hagerstown is located.

He did not respond to several requests for comment.

On the form, Holsinger purportedly wrote that he “designed and implemented tactical rescue drills” and had “experience with an assortment of weapons (lethal and nonlethal).”
Officers joined the Oath Keepers

USA TODAY contacted dozens of active-duty and retired officers to ask why they joined the Oath Keepers. Most didn't respond; nearly everyone who did said they were no longer members. One retired Marine and correctional officer said he supports the group.

In 20 cases, law enforcement agencies or the men themselves confirmed they were still employed. Among the officers identified on the membership list are:


An officer at the Louisville Metro Police Department who was involved in a shooting in 2018.


A former U.S. Army member who joined the New York Police Department and a former U.S. Army captain who joined the Chicago Police Department. Both are still police officers there.

An 80-year-old, part-time officer at the Ashley County Sheriff’s Office in Arkansas.

A corrections officer in Riverside, California.

Maj. Eben Bratcher, operations chief with the Yuma County Sheriff's Office in Arizona, is among them. Bratcher told USA TODAY he recalled receiving newsletters from the group for "some time."

"I may have signed up many years ago but do not recall any specifics," Bratcher said. "I do know that I unsubscribed some time ago due to the sheer volume of email I received."

A note attributed to Bratcher on the sign-up list reads, "We have 85 sworn officers and Border (of) Mexico on the South and California on the West. I've already introduced your web site to dozens of my Deputies."

Bratcher said he didn't recall writing that. "It is probable that I spoke to numerous people about the new organization," he said.

Constable Joe Wright of Collin County, Texas, said he joined in 2012, when he was running for office for the first time.

"To be honest, I felt pressured to join it in this county for political support," Wright said. "The Oath Keepers, if you didn’t support them, you were going to get bad reviews."

Wright said he didn't know much about the group at the time. He said he remembers receiving a box of Oath Keepers paraphernalia, including brochures and stickers, after signing up. He said he threw it in the trash and hasn't engaged with the group since being elected in the county northeast of Dallas.

"I don’t support them," Wright said. "I’m not into radical. I’m into doing my job."
Officers say they're no longer members

Several officers admitted signing up but claimed their membership expired long ago.

For example, Michael Lynch, an officer with the Anaheim Police Department in California, said he joined the Oath Keepers many years ago, but he didn’t renew his membership when he learned more about the group.

"I didn't get anything out of it," he said in an interview. "There was no local chapter or anything, so when it came time to renew, I was like, I'm not sending another $40."

Lynch was the officer who boasted of his undercover, surveillance and SWAT training.

“Obviously, we had no knowledge of this,” said Sgt. Shane Carringer, an Anaheim spokesman. “We will look into what options we have as a department while considering what rights our officer has."

Other departments have suspended or investigated officers for associating with the group.
Always an extremist group, but lately more extreme

It’s unclear from the hacked data exactly when the officers in question signed up. Experts on the Oath Keepers said the group has changed since its founding in 2009.

What started during the Obama administration as a group to fight what it saw as federal government overreach developed into a more hateful and paranoid organization, said Heidi Beirich, co-founder of the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism. She has tracked the Oath Keepers since their inception.

“Rhodes and company have become much more radical,” Beirich said.

The Oath Keepers was always an extremist group, she said, founded in nonsensical and hateful conspiracy theories, and it's always had an anti-government bent.

Kelly Meggs, according to the FBI, is the leader of the Oath Keepers in Florida, and was arrested and charged with participating in the Capitol riot.

She and other experts said they were concerned about law enforcement officers who joined the Oath Keepers.

“I don’t think police officers should be involved with extremist groups,” Beirich said. "You are a part of the government, you represent the full, whole community as a police officer, and there’s obviously a problem when you’re in a group that’s questioning the government’s right to do the things that the government has the right to do.”

J.J. MacNab, a fellow at George Washington University’s Program on Extremism, said she understands how law enforcement officers could have joined the Oath Keepers years ago without knowing much about it.

Lynch, the officer in Anaheim, said he joined in 2016 after talking to recruiters at a booth at a gun show in Las Vegas. He said he thought they were an alternative to the National Rifle Association.

"People join stuff all the time without doing any due diligence," MacNab said. "And for years, the only due diligence you could have done was on the Southern Poverty Law Center's website, and most police officers would immediately dismiss that as biased."

For most Americans, joining the Oath Keepers is an act protected by the First Amendment. But several Supreme Court cases have established that police departments can place broad limits on what their employees may say or write and what organizations they belong to.

Most officers are under the false impression that the First Amendment gives them the right to say just about anything on social media or in public, said Val Van Brocklin, a former federal prosecutor who trains police departments on using social media.

"The vast majority of cops in the country don't understand this," Van Brocklin said. "A public employer does not have to pay you for your insubordination or dishonorable conduct that sullies the badge and the uniform."

Contributing: Aleszu Bajak, Dan Keemahill, Mike Stucka

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Oath Keepers hack exposes law enforcement officers across US

Oath Keepers Panicked That the Left Would ‘Decapitate’ Them After Failed Capitol Putsch


Kelly Weill
Fri, October 1, 2021

Photo Illustration by The Daily Beast / Photos Getty

In the weeks after the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, the leader of far-right group the Oath Keepers encouraged members to borrow money to hoard fuel, in advance of what the group claimed would be a Biden administration attack on the power grid. All the while, the group was making almost daily withdrawals from a crowdfunding site, totaling nearly $30,000.

A leaked trove of Oath Keepers messages, uploaded by the transparency group Distributed Denial of Secrets this week, reveals some of the group’s communications after members participated in the Capitol attack. Prominent in the leak are paranoid email blasts from the group’s founder, Stuart Rhodes, who told members that the Biden White House was about to “conduct a ‘night of the long knives’ decapitation strike” on Oath Keepers under the guise of a massive power outage. Those conspiratorial fears were frequently accompanied by appeals to spend money.

One week after the Capitol attack, while Donald Trump still held office, Rhodes sent an email pleading for the then-president to invoke the Insurrection Act in order to cling to power, leaked emails show. (Although the message is addressed to Trump, it is unclear whether Rhodes sent it to him or merely included its text in an email to Oath Keepers.) Part of Rhodes’s justification, a mere seven days after the Capitol riot, was the supposed threat from the left, which he thought would begin attacking pro-Trump families.

Plea Deals Are Tearing the Oath Keepers Apart

“The domestic enemy wolves will be at the door of all your supporters as well,” Rhodes wrote. “Liberty-loving American constitutionalists will have no choice but to honor their oaths and defend both the Constitution and their families when the communists and obedient Deep State minions come for them (as they are already planning on doing).”

Like others on the far right, Rhodes appeared to believe conspiracy theories about Trump secretly holding onto damaging secrets that would destroy the left. Rhodes encouraged Trump to leak those supposed secrets on fringe sites like 8chan.

“At the very least, do the mass declassification and data dump,” Rhodes wrote. “You still have absolute authority as President and Commander-in-Chief to declassify any files held by the CIA, FBI, NSA, etc. Use trusted elite units you know are still loyal to the Constitution to get it done (to seize the servers and dump the data on 4Chan, 8Chan, etc).”

Rhodes included the text of that letter in an email blast to Oath Keepers titled “OATH KEEPERS WARNING ORDER PART I.” In it, Rhodes warned followers of the “very high possibility” that the Biden administration would supposedly take out the power grid and begin carrying out targeted strikes on conservatives.

“Within the short term, we face a very high possibilty [sic] of an intentional ‘comms down’ scenario where black hats take down/shut down all communications in the US - No cell service, no internet, no land lines. A comms blackout. This could also include a take down of electrical power. An intentional power blackout. Worst case scenario would be an EMP [electromagnetic pulse] strike,” Rhodes told Oath Keepers on Jan. 13. “The purpose of such a comms down/blackout will be to minimize our ability to communicate and to pin people in their homes as the black hats and their terrorist allies conduct a ‘night of the long knives’ decapitation strike to arrest or otherwise take out patriot leaders, potential leaders, and highly skilled personnel.” (The reference to the “night of the long knives” was the second time Rhodes compared the Biden administration to Nazis in that email.)

Rhodes encouraged followers to plan for militia-led evacuations of homes during the fantasy power grid attack, and to hoard fuel, even going into debt if necessary. “Get all the fuel you can - gas, diesel, NOW,” he wrote. “Get the fuel out of the underground storage tanks and into portable containers. Get all you can. You will need it. Borrow money or charge it if you have to.”

Rhodes did not return requests for comment on whether he believed such attacks were still imminent.

Those leaked email comments show a continued ratcheting-up of Oath Keepers rhetoric, even after the Capitol riot.

Rhodes claims to have been uninvolved and unaware of Oath Keepers’ efforts to breach the Capitol. In speeches at D.C. rallies before Jan. 6, however, he preached a similar brand of anti-left apocalypticism, which extremism monitors described as a warning sign before the Capitol attack. During one such speech, in December, he called on Trump to invoke the Insurrection Act and warned that “if he does not do it now while he is Commander in Chief, we’re going to have to do it ourselves later, in a much more desperate, much more bloody war.”

Rhodes also appeared to support court-based efforts to overturn President Joe Biden’s victory. In a Jan. 28 email, Oath Keepers lawyer Kellye Sorelle sent an email blast to the group stating that “Stewart agreed to allow me to send out an email to all the chapters requesting assistance.”

Sorelle asked members of the group for help finding documentation “for all 50 states regarding their orders/policy changes modifying their absentee ballot process, the use of drop boxes, voter registration changes and certification information for the machines used for elections. I also need evidence from the counties/states documenting that the data/ballots are not maintained for 22 months as required by law.”

Sorelle did not return requests for comment about the nature of her request, and whether Oath Keepers mobilized to help her. At the time of her request, Sorelle was involved in a baffling court case that cited a law from the fictional Lord of the Rings universe in an attempt to nullify Biden’s win. (The case was dismissed in September.)

Some of Rhodes’s emails during this period included requests for donations to the Oath Keepers. Although a public Oath Keepers fundraiser on the site GiveSendGo was a flop in spring 2021, the group was actively withdrawing tens of thousands from an account on the crowdfunding site RallyPay, leaked withdrawals show.

From Jan. 18 to Feb. 16, New Jersey Oath Keeper Edward Durfee made withdrawals from the account almost daily, totaling more than $28,000. Durfee, who is running for office in New Jersey, did not return requests for comment on Thursday (nor did he respond previously, when asked about allegations that Oath Keepers swindled application fees).

The purpose of the Oath Keepers’ RallyPay account is unclear. Leaked chat logs reveal the group “promoted” one such account in support of alleged Capitol rioter Jessica Watkins. The Oath Keepers have also run their own RallyPay fundraisers since at least October 2020.

Questions about money are laced through the leaked emails. In February, Rhodes emailed Oath Keepers asking for their help responding to a tornado in Alabama. Although the email called for volunteers, it also asked for donations. Two days later, Rhodes emailed again, informing followers that local first responders had declined the group’s services.

‘Prepared for Violence’: Prosecutors Are Closing in on Oath Keepers Leader

“The local PD has let us know they have enough man-power to cover their needs and the security need is not as bad as first anticipated. Therefore, we are standing down on this operation,” Rhodes wrote. Nevertheless, he noted, the Oath Keepers would like to keep the donations it had received for the Alabama mission.

“To those who donated to support this mission: we greatly appreciate your support,” he wrote. “Donors like you make what we do possible and we couldn’t do it without you. We hope you will simply let us use your donation to fund our future operations (no doubt we will be in the field again very soon) and our ongoing expenses. However, if you donated to this effort and do want a refund, email us and we’ll get it done.”

Refunds were a problem for the Oath Keepers in early 2021, as The Daily Beast previously reported. Multiple would-be Oath Keepers emailed the group, complaining that they had sent application fees but never heard back about membership.

One application came from a former leader of the Proud Boys, a different far-right paramilitary group. Leaked chat logs reveal that Jason Lee Van Dyke, who briefly served as the head of the Proud Boys, attempted to join the Oath Keepers in March. Van Dyke has previously been accused of using a Proud Boy chapter to surveil an enemy—a charge Van Dyke denies.

Van Dyke told The Daily Beast that Oath Keepers did not ask him about his Proud Boys affiliation. He said he joined the group’s chat briefly, but few people talked to him, even to onboard him as a member. Chat logs show him offering to pay a $50 membership fee, but being told that the group’s payment processors were currently down.

“I seem to recall a time when I might have been in their chat but I was in there for a little bit and as far as I know, that group is completely defunct,” Van Dyke told The Daily Beast. “I don't remember my password to get in there. They don’t have memberships to get in there anymore. If I remember correctly, that chat was dead as a doornail.”

PATRIARCY IS MISOGYNY

'Anti-feminist' vandals in Israel deface images of women

LAURIE KELLMAN
Fri, October 1, 2021

JERUSALEM (AP) — The joyful glint in Peggy Parnass' eyes is so sharp it can be seen from the walls of Jerusalem's bustling Old City. Posted across the street at the gateway to City Hall, twin images of the Holocaust survivor and activist gaze out at the ancient warren of holy monuments of Christianity, Judaism and Islam.

But just outside this center of spirituality, someone saw her image as a problem. Five times since the photos of Parnass were posted as part of an exhibition that began in April, vandals — widely believed to be ultra-Orthodox extremists — spray-painted over her eyes and mouth.

The graffiti was cleaned each time, leaving Parnass smiling again. For many Israelis, however, the short-term fix highlighted a familiar pattern that's all the more painful because the destruction is coming not from enemies across Israel's borders but from within.

“It's not anti-Semitic,” said Jim Hollander, the curator of The Lonka Project art installation at Safra Square. “This is anti-feminist.”

For all of its modernity, military firepower and high-tech know-how, Israel has for decades been unable to keep images of women from being defaced in some public spaces. Billboards showing women -- including soccer players, musicians and young girls -- have been repeatedly defaced and torn down by religious extremists in Jerusalem and other cities with large ultra-Orthodox populations over the past 20 years.

Even German Chancellor Angela Merkel was erased from a 2015 photograph of world leaders in Paris published by an ultra-Orthodox newspaper.

The pattern is especially uncomfortable now.

“This is not Kabul, this is Jerusalem,” said Fleur Hassan-Nahoum, a Jerusalem deputy mayor. “This is a concerted campaign by radicals to erase women from the public space, which belongs to all of us."

The double photo of 94-year-old Parnass, who lives in Germany, is posted on an outside wall of Jerusalem's City Hall complex.

Hollander said he specifically chose it among dozens of others posted around the complex to hang in the marquee spot because it projects vitality, perseverance and survival across one of Israel's most famous expanses. Its central location makes it visible to thousands every day.

The vandalism is widely blamed on a small number of fringe members of the insular ultra-Orthodox community, which emphasizes modesty among women and has traditionally carried outsized influence in Israeli politics. The photo is posted next to a street that borders an ultra-Orthodox neighborhood and is a popular walkway to the Old City's Western Wall, the holiest Jewish prayer site.

Ultra-Orthodox Jews make up about 12.6% of Israel's population of 9.3 million. That community's population is growing faster than those of other Israeli Jews and Arabs, according to the Israel Democracy Institute, a nonpartisan Jerusalem think tank. A majority of Jerusalem's Jewish community is ultra-Orthodox, the institute said.

There is a difference, one expert cautioned, between the more pragmatic mainstream ultra-Orthodox Judaism and the vandals defacing photos of women.

“In the mainstream, they know that the world outside is functioning in a different way,” said Gilad Malach, who leads the ultra-Orthodox program at the Israel Democracy Institute. "And they know that in some situations, they need to cooperate with that."

In the mainstream Orthodox community, some women have begun to push back on social media.

“The men aren’t in charge there,” said Kerry Bar-Cohn, 48, an Orthodox chiropractor and performer who a few years ago started posting YouTube videos of herself singing children's songs. Recently, she tried to publish an ad in a local circular with her photo on it, and was refused.

“It’s straight-out discrimination,” said Bar-Cohn, wife of a rabbi and a mother of four. “I was thinking I want to sue them, but No. 1, who has the time? And No. 2, you don’t want to be that person.”

Advocates say erasing women carries dire societal risks.

“You don’t see women, you don’t hear their needs and their needs are not met,” said Shoshanna Keats Jaskoll, 46.

Keats Jaskoll recently launched the subscription-only Jewish Life Photo Bank, a collection of what she calls “positive” images of Orthodox women for the Chochmat Nashim organization. The idea is to sell images of women that are acceptable to an Orthodox audience and better understood by people in general.

None of these initiatives has halted the constant wave of vandalism.

The Israel Religious Action Center, which is connected to the liberal Reform movement of Judaism, has tracked the vandalism and other attacks on women's images for five years and filed a court petition to compel the city of Jerusalem to crack down.

Over time, the municipality has responded by saying it is engaged in “massive, effective and focused enforcement” of city bylaws against vandalism, but it acknowledged difficulty in collecting testimony and prosecuting suspects.

“The Jerusalem municipality has and will continue to condemn any damage to public images and deals with the problem if appears on the spot,” the city said in a statement.

Police say they investigate all complaints of vandalism and property damage and try to find those responsible, but had no information about the Parnass case.

By refusing or being unable to crack down, "the state sponsors this practice,” said Ori Narov, an attorney for IRAC. “We keep getting this impression that they keep making excuses," ranging from a shortage of labor to even more limits due to the coronavirus pandemic.

The municipality said the Parnass photos have been restored and it has increased patrols around City Hall.

Parnass' niece, Keren-Or Peled, who lives in Israel, says Parnass has been told what happened. After her photos were cleaned for a third time, Peled traveled to Jerusalem to take a photo to send to her aunt.

By the time Peled got there, however, the set of photos had been defaced again. She helped clean it herself.

“They paint over your picture time and time again because you are a woman," Peled wrote to her aunt in an article published in Haaretz. ”A beautiful, strong, confident 94-year-old woman.”

—-

Associated Press writer Ilan Ben Zion contributed.

Israel Womens Images Erased

This Sept. 22, 2021, file photo, shows a detail of a billboard with a defaced image of an ultra-Orthodox woman, on a street in Jerusalem. Israel is having a difficult time keeping images of women in public from being defaced. Billboards showing women -- whether they are soccer players, musicians or young girls -- have been repeatedly defaced and torn down by religious extremists in Jerusalem and other cities. 

(AP Photo/Sebastian Scheiner, File)

Billionaires Get Help From China Move to Contain Evergrande



Blake Schmidt
Thu, September 30, 2021
(Bloomberg) -- China’s purchase of a stake in a struggling regional bank from China Evergrande Group aimed at preventing contagion is also benefiting Shengjing Bank Co.’s investors, including some poker pals of Evergrande founder Hui Ka Yan.

Evergrande agreed to sell a 20% stake in the bank to the local Shenyang government for 10 billion yuan ($1.55 billion), with the bank demanding that all proceeds go to settle debts with the lender. The deal marks the first step toward solving Evergrande’s liquidity crisis, S&P Global Ratings said. Shengjing Bank rose 1.4% on Wednesday in Hong Kong on the agreement, then dropped the same amount Thursday.

Recent investors in Shengjing Bank include the following people who have backed Hui and Evergrande financially:

Cheung Chung Kiu

The Chongqing, China-born chairman and founder of Hong Kong-listed company C C Land Holdings Ltd. is a regular player of the Big Two poker game with Hui. Cheung started off buying electronics and other goods in Hong Kong to resell in the mainland, and later moved into property. Today, his C C Land has billions of dollars of property in the U.K., including the “Cheesegrater” skyscraper in London’s financial district. Cheung held direct and indirect minority interests in Shengjing as of June 30, according to the bank’s latest shareholder disclosure.

Cheng family

Henry Cheng, chairman of New World Development, is the wealthiest of Hui’s poker pals, with a fortune worth $23.5 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. He is the eldest son of the late Cheng Yu-tung, who fled rural Guangdong to Macau in 1940 ahead of the Japanese occupation, married a goldsmith’s daughter and built a fortune in the property business. The Chengs have invested in Evergrande projects and company shares, including this year’s public offering of Evergrande’s online real estate and automobile marketplaces known as FCB. The family held a minority interest in Shengjing indirectly, according to the report.

Paul Suen

Suen was once known as Hong Kong’s “shell king” for having stakes in dozens of small companies as he played the city’s penny stocks. His holdings include a minority stake in Shengjing held directly and indirectly. He has also invested in English football club Birmingham City and London’s Les Ambassadeurs Club, a casino that appears in the James Bond film “Dr. No.” A 2019 disclosure of Suen’s purchase of a stake in Shengjing Bank also showed that he held an interest in Evergrande’s electric-car company at the time, as well as Evergrande bonds.

Karen Lo

Lo is a wealthy scion of Hong Kong’s biggest soy-milk dynasty whose real estate holdings range from mansions in Holmby Hills and Malibu, California, to pop star Sting’s former apartment overlooking New York’s Central Park. The University of Pennsylvania graduate, who has held shares of dozens of companies, went from being an investor in Hong Kong-listed fashion company Esprit Holdings Ltd. to its biggest shareholder. Lo has made investments alongside Suen, including a stake in Shengjing from 2019, when they also disclosed interests in Evergrande’s electric-car company. Lo and her partner -- Eugene Chuang, an investor and horse-racing enthusiast -- endowed a professorship in their name at University of Hong Kong. A Sept. 27 Shengjing filing with the Hong Kong exchange shows that Lo no longer has an interest requiring disclosure.

Lau family

Joseph Lau’s Chinese Estates sold its holdings in Shengjing in 2017 to a company owned by his wife, Chan Hoi-wan. Chan later sold those and hasn’t had a notifiable interest in the company since January 2020, according to a filing. The billionaire family of Lau, another of Hui’s poker pals, has also been selling Evergrande shares.

(Updates with S&P report in second paragraph.)

RIGHT TO WORK ANTI UNION STATE
Production begins at new Alabama auto plant; hiring ongoing


This photo combination shows the logo for, from left, Mazda and Toyota. The first vehicles are rolling off the line of a new auto plant in Huntsville, Ala., Thursday, Sept. 30, 2021, and the joint venture between Mazda and Toyota is still hiring workers. (AP Photo/File)

Thu, September 30, 2021

HUNTSVILLE, Alabama (AP) — Production has begun at a new auto plant in north Alabama and the companies running the facility continue to hire workers at a brisk pace.

Work on the first 2022 Corolla Cross vehicles began with the press of a button at the Mazda Toyota Manufacturing, a joint venture between Mazda Motor Corp. and Toyota Motor Corp.

In 2018, the Japanese automakers selected Huntsville, Alabama, for the mammoth facility that will eventually have the capability to produce up to 300,000 vehicles per year, split evenly between Mazda and Toyota.

The joint venture on Thursday said it was in the middle of hiring another 1,700 workers and anticipates reaching up to 4,000 employees once production is in full operation next year.

“This is the moment MTM and our North Alabama community have waited for since we broke ground in November 2018,” said Mark Brazeal, a vice president at the facility. “We are excited to see Corolla Cross in dealerships across the U.S.”

More than $2.3 billion has been invested in the plant and the companies last year committed another $830 million to ensure cutting-edge technologies could be worked into its manufacturing processes.

The Psychedelics Industry Could Offer a Whole New Approach to Work


Shelby Hartman and Madison Margolin
Sat, October 2, 2021,

psychedelic-column-industry - Credit: Illustration by Carolina Rodríguez Fuenmayor for Rolling Stone
This column is a collaboration with DoubleBlind, a print magazine and media company at the forefront of the psychedelic movement.

As the world of psychedelics matures to include both a grassroots movement and a burgeoning legal industry — echoing the process that cannabis went through a few years ago — many are wondering what kinds of new jobs will become available in the psychedelic space. Will psychedelics come to resemble most other mainstream, corporate North American industries — or can we expect something that more reflects the spirit and ethos of the medicines that have been used for generations?

For the question of what of jobs will be available, the short answer is, all different kinds. “As psychedelics go from the fringe to the mainstream, the same types of jobs for every other industry that went from fringe to mainstream apply to this one,” says Lewis Goldberg, a managing partner at KCSA, a communications consultancy that works with a handful of companies in the psychedelic space. “I would tell anyone who wants to get into the space to do it, but you better move fast. I’ll steal a line from Aldous Huxley: ‘The doors of perception are wide open, but the doors of opportunity are still closing.’”


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In the last couple of years, there’s been an exponential growth in the number of drug development companies seeking to take psychedelic compounds through the FDA approval process. MDMA, sometimes referred to as “ecstasy,” and psilocybin, one of the primary psychoactive components in psychedelic mushrooms, are both projected to be legal for prescription in the next five years. Meanwhile, more than a dozen drug development companies have now brought in hundreds of millions of dollars to research compounds from 5-MeO-DMT for depression to novel psychedelics they’re hoping will remove the possibility for a “bad trip.”

Indeed, it’s not just those developing the drugs who will be in on this industry — careers will span from lawyers who specialize in helping entrepreneurs navigate the legal landscape, to therapists who help patients integrate their experiences after a psychedelic trip, to receptionists who greet visitors at psychedelic clinics across the country.

“If you think that in the last three years, something like $3 billion of venture money has been pumped into the industry, that’s a tremendous amount, but not a lot of money — it’s building the foundation for a multi-trillion-dollar industry,” says Goldberg. “Five of the top 25 selling drugs in the world are designed to treat central nervous system disorders. This collective group of [psychedelic] companies is going to disrupt that. Some are going to be the equivalents of Google or Amazon and some are going to be Pets.com.” Although Goldberg is a self-proclaimed “regular mainstream capitalist,” he says that “the companies looking to be open-source are more likely to be successful and have a societal impact than those that are looking to solely work on their own.” In the field of psychedelics, being open source means allowing everyone in the field access to your data and research, in the spirit of progressing the movement as a whole — as opposed to prioritizing your company’s profitability.

Of course, open source alone is not enough to ensure that key players in the space are working toward a compassionate and equitable psychedelic industry. “This will require a lot of personal and internal decolonization work by the emerging ‘leaders’ of this space,” says Charlotte James, co-founder of The Ancestor Project, an educational platform designed for people of color that offers workshops and resources for members on the plant medicine journey. “We believe that by doing this work first, it then becomes natural to understand your role in the collective liberation movement that this medicine wants us to usher in. An equitable ‘industry’ won’t be an ‘industry’ as we currently understand it to be, and instead a mycelial-like network of co-creation across diverse communities and environments.”

So far, James doesn’t know a single BIPOC-led organization that has significant financial support in the psychedelic space, which, she says, leads to a widening gap between the grassroots movement and the corporate. “More folks are recognizing that in order to move away from capitalism, we have to break the work patterns that are ingrained in us, [since] those patterns that contribute to the glorified ‘hustle and grind’ culture are actually just extensions of systemic oppression,” says James. “Reclaiming our relationship to creativity and productivity will support us in being able to imagine a different and more equitable future in which our value is not defined by our bodies or our productivity.”

The psychedelic approach to work culture may lie in the way we regard our professional life versus our personal life. There’s a paradigm shift in being able to “bring your full self to work,” says Gareth Hermann, co-founder and CEO at Magic, a marketing agency in the psychedelic space. “At Magic, we don’t like the term ‘balance’ because it brings up the image of being on a seesaw, so we’re creating a culture that’s more celebratory of work-life ‘presence’ to create a space for the whole human to show up at work,” says Jennifer Ellis, chief people officer at Magic. The agency even goes so far as to offer programs that support repatterning, helping teammates recognize states of response and triggers so that they can develop better emotional literacy. Ultimately, Hermann explains, those shifts in beliefs and values create more possibility for us to make foundational impacts in the world at large.

What psychedelics offer is an invitation to look at professional and economic systems more, well, psychedelically. But it takes time leaning into the paradigm shift: Mike Margolies, founder of the educational conversation series Psychedelic Seminars, used to work a corporate job before an ayahuasca trip set him off on a journey that led to quitting, traveling, and creating a career in psychedelics. “The irony was that after all that, I had created myself a desk job, and I was like wait, what am I doing here?” he says. “I was thinking a lot about how you spend your time is how you spend your life.”

Among tactics like designated days dedicated for “work or task mode” versus “flow mode,” he now makes space to “allow for ‘productivity’ to happen in a different way.” “We have this idea of what a job is, what being productive is, but even though we’re all psychedelic, we’ve put ourselves in the same old boxes,” he says. “Because we have to have a work ethic, a mission, and so much urgency, we end up embodying the systems that we’re purportedly working to reinvent.” Indeed, a question not uncommon among psychedelic folk is whether a company can really heal the ill effects of capitalism in individuals and the collective, while also working within a capitalist system. Capitalism has us thinking that “work” has to be a certain way—a 40-hour a week grind. “It’s crazy that that’s become the standard,” Margolies says. “The goal isn’t to get everyone working” — in the standard capitalistic sense — “but how do we get everyone self-actualized? Achieving collective self-actualization is intrinsically the pathway to creating the most value for each other.”

Britain is short 100,000 truckers. The drivers it spurned don't want to come back.

Alexander Smith

Fri, October 1, 2021, 8:28 AM·

LONDON — Faced with dry gas stations and bare grocery shelves, the British government is offering 5,000 temporary visas for foreign truck drivers to prevent a looming crisis ahead of Christmas.

But despite this potentially lucrative offer, many truckers who left the country after it exited the European Union say they have no plans to help solve a problem stoked in part by the consequences of Brexit.

Artur Jarzebski says he will not work in the United Kingdom because he no longer feels welcome in post-Brexit Britain.

"English society decided that the Polish people are not worth enough to stay in the U.K.," said Jarzebski, 42, a Polish trucker who spent a decade toiling long hours on British highways. "After Brexit, Polish drivers feel unwanted by the U.K. market."

The U.K. is facing the same supply chain problems as the U.S. and Europe. Older truckers are retiring and youngsters, perhaps reassessing their lives amid the Covid-19 pandemic, don't want to work the long hours or return to life on the road, which is lonely and not conducive to social relationships.

Image: A student at a heavy goods vehicle training center in Croydon, England (Leon Neal / Getty Images)

The virus made things worse, delaying tests for new drivers and making it more difficult to haul goods from one country to the next. But the U.K. is being squeezed by another factor: Brexit.

After the vote, an estimated 20,000 truckers went back to Europe and never returned.

The U.K. is currently around 100,000 truck drivers short, according to industry officials. In recent days, that's translated into winding lines outside gas stations because there aren't enough licensed drivers to deliver fuel from refineries. The issue has been compounded by panic-buying.

Some supermarket shelves are also empty, with a shortage of workers in the food processing sector, also partly down to Covid and the Brexit exodus, beginning to bite.

Image: Artur Jarzebski (Courtesy / Artur Jarzebski)

In a sign of how bad things are, the British government will deploy the military to drive gas tankers "in the next couple of days," Business Secretary Kwasi Kwarteng told reporters Wednesday.

The government is also trying to fast-track driver training. And it is offering the 5,000 temporary visas for the three months until Dec. 24, as well as 5,500 visas for poultry workers.

For the critics of Brexit, there is a certain irony to all this. The vote to leave the E.U. was motivated in part by a desire to curb immigration and stop as many foreign workers as possible from competing for British jobs. Now the U.K. is in trouble, and it wants foreign workers to save it.

The demand has seen trucker wages spike. But many European drivers say the upheaval of moving to another country outside the E.U. for three months is not worth it. Others are unhappy that only now is their crucial role in the supply chain being acknowledged after being taken for granted for decades.

Image: Freight trucks line up on the M20 motorway near Dover port in December 2020 (Andrew Aitchison / Getty Images file)

As well as the sense that Brexit exposed Britain's unwelcoming side, some drivers are also scarred by the memory of what happened last Christmas: More than 6,000 trucks stuck outside the English port of Dover after France closed its border to try to contain Covid's Kent variant.

Thousands of drivers were forced to sleep in their cabs Christmas Day.

"I have friends from Lithuania and Czech Republic, and what they told me is there is no point in coming just to work on a three-month visa," said Mateusz Ozimek, 31, a trucker who was born in Kraków, Poland, and now lives in London. "The money is quite decent but the way they treated us last Christmas will not be forgotten."

"You have to remember that drivers spend most of their time on their own. They always remember when someone did something wrong to them," he added.

Image: Mateusz Ozimek (Courtesy / Mateusz Ozimek)

Though many industry figures and experts say Brexit has exacerbated the crisis, most agree it is only one cause among several.

In the U.S., the number of people working in the trucking industry also nosedived when the pandemic hit, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. This has since recovered, but the workforce is still around 26,000 workers short of its pre-pandemic levels.

The same is true in Europe. Britain may struggle to fill its 5,000 temporary visas with European drivers because the reality is that there are shortages across the continent too, according to Benoit Lefere, a spokesperson for UPTR, a Belgian logistics union.

"Brexit has meant that the U.K. has been confronted with this problem now — but Europe will face the same problem, just a few years down the line," he said. "Perhaps by then, the U.K. will have found a solution."

Over the Course of the Pandemic, Bugs Have Invaded the World’s Most Popular Museums

Jessica Cherner

Fri, October 1, 2021, 

If you’ve ever aimlessly wandered through the great halls of such museums as New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, Madrid’s Museo del Prado, and Paris’s Musée d’Orsay, and wondered how these centuries-old works by the likes of the world’s most famous painters have managed to survive the test of time, you’re not alone. Even shortly after their completion, the pieces on canvas boasted a certain delicacy and fragility that required the most precious handling. Now, of course, the museums enlist the best restorers in their fields to keep the priceless works of art in peak condition, but the last year and a half presented these experts with a rather unexpected challenge—bugs.

Jean-Baptiste Tilliar’s plush daybed displayed at the J. Paul Getty Museum played host to quite a few pests, so conservators and preparators thoroughly cleaned each individual component before isolating the entire piece with a plastic tarp.

Photo: J. Paul Getty Museum

While bugs may be annoying to us, they can be detrimental to, say, Jean-Baptiste Tilliar’s pink 18th-century daybed at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles. The unticketed guests, most commonly the one-centimeter-long webbing clothes moths we all know and hate during sweater season, typically devour wool, silk, and dust—feasts that are available at museums. Not to mention that the unexpected shutdown of every museum from Cape Town to Boston last year created an ideal environment for bugs, the Artnet News reports.

Not only is there a sizable buildup of dust and other debris from constant visitors (and the immediate lack thereof), but it was also prime breeding season when the pandemic began. Plus, another potential reason for the explosion of art-destroying moths in some of the hottest spots in the world is bugs’ dislike for disruption and crowds, so hundreds of suddenly empty galleries afforded the pesky insects to be left to their own devices.

Kleidermotte Tineola bisselliella

An adult webbing clothes moth.

Photo: Schellhorn/ullstein bild/Getty Images

Luckily, the bugs won’t win this battle because museums, including the J. Paul Getty, have instituted a very particular cleaning routine that relies more heavily on anoxic treatments than they do on harsh chemicals, which could potentially damage the art. The conservators also employ 20-foot-long insulated cargo containers whose internal temperatures dip as low as negative 20 degrees Fahrenheit. The freezers can hold anywhere between three and six objects per ten-day treatment, killing any adults, larvae, or eggs that may be calling an ornate 17th-century tapestry home.

Like any deep-cleaning project, ones on this scale can take quite a bit of time. In fact, Madeline Corona, assistant conservator of the decorative arts and sculpture conservation at the J. Getty Museum says exclusively to AD, “Our deep-cleaning project took approximately a year to complete. Regular gallery cleaning is an important aspect of preventive conservation and is always an ongoing activity.”

TOPSHOT-BRITAIN-HEALTH-VIRUS-MUSEUM

Cleaning and de-bugging is well underway at the British Museum where staff members use specific dusting practices to clear any webs or nests.

Photo: Paul Ellis/Getty Images

The thing is: Bugs are as much a part of museums as the art itself. Even with constant surveillance and treatment, the annoying insects have and always will be present in museums. Corona explains, “Pest management programs are an integral part of the preservation of any collection. Our monitoring program did exactly what we wanted it to: It alerted us of an uptick early on and allowed us to get ahead of it. The pandemic gave us the opportunity to respond in a very holistic way because we didn’t have visitors on-site.” In post-lockdown life, however, more thorough cleaning practices are in place to keep the bugs as much at bay as possible, letting the works of art take center stage.

Originally Appeared on Architectural Digest

EVOLUTION IN ACTION

Is the Coronavirus Getting Better at Airborne Transmission?


A man sits near a window as people wearing face masks walk along a pedestrian crossing at Shibuya district Thursday, Sept. 30, 2021, in Tokyo

(AP Photo/Eugene Hoshiko)

Apoorva Mandavilli
Sat, October 2, 2021, 

Newer variants of the coronavirus such as alpha and delta are highly contagious, infecting far more people than the original virus. Two new studies offer a possible explanation: The virus is evolving to spread more efficiently through air.

The realization that the coronavirus is airborne indoors transformed efforts to contain the pandemic last year, igniting fiery debates about masks, social distancing and ventilation in public spaces.

Most researchers now agree that the coronavirus is mostly transmitted through large droplets that quickly sink to the floor and through much smaller ones, called aerosols, that can float over longer distances indoors and settle directly into the lungs, where the virus is most harmful.

The new studies don’t fundamentally change that view. But the findings signal the need for better masks in some situations, and indicate that the virus is changing in ways that make it more formidable.

“This is not an Armageddon scenario,” said Vincent Munster, a virus expert at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, who led one of the new studies. “It is like a modification of the virus to more-efficient transmission, which is something I think we all kind of expected, and we now see it happening in real time.”

Munster’s team showed that small aerosols traveled much longer distances than larger droplets and the alpha variant was much more likely to cause new infections via aerosol transmission. The second study found that people infected with alpha exhaled about 43 times more virus into tiny aerosols than those infected with older variants.

The studies compared the alpha variant with the original virus or other older variants. But the results may also explain why the delta variant is so contagious — and why it displaced all other versions of the virus.

“It really indicates that the virus is evolving to become more efficient at transmitting through the air,” said Linsey Marr, an expert in airborne viruses at Virginia Tech who was not involved in either study. “I wouldn’t be surprised if, with delta, that factor were even higher.”

The ultratransmissibility of the variants may come down to a mix of factors. It may be that lower doses of the variants are required for infection, or that the variants replicate faster, or that more of the variant virus is exhaled into aerosols — or all three.

The alpha variant proved to be twice as transmissible as the original virus, and the delta variant has mutations that turbocharged its contagiousness even more. As the virus continues to change, newer variants may turn out to be even more transmissible, experts said.

But the tools at our disposal all still work well to halt the spread. Even loose-fitting cloth and surgical masks block about half of the fine aerosols containing virus, according to the study of people infected with variants, published this month in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases.

Still, at least in some crowded spaces, people may want to consider switching to more protective masks, said Don Milton, an aerosol expert at the University of Maryland who led the research.

“Given that it seems to be evolving towards generating aerosols better, then we need better containment and better personal protection,” Milton said of the virus. “We are recommending people move to tighter-fitting masks.”

To compare how different variants spread through the air, his team asked participants with mild or asymptomatic infections to recite the alphabet, sing “Happy Birthday” loudly or shout out the University of Maryland slogan, “Go, Terps!”

People infected with the alpha variant had copious amounts of virus in their nose and throat, much more than those infected with the original virus. But even after adjusting for that difference, those infected with the variant released about 18 times as much virus into the smallest aerosols.

But the researchers examined only four people infected with alpha, and 45 with older variants. That could skew the observed differences between the variants, said Seema Lakdawala, a respiratory virus expert at the University of Pittsburgh, who was not involved in either new study.

Infected people can pass the virus along to many, many others — or to none at all. How much virus they expel may depend on where in the respiratory tract it is replicating, on the nature of the mucus in its environment and on what other microbes it may hitch a ride with.

“We have really no idea why some individuals are superspreaders and others are not,” Lakdawala said. “There’s a lot of heterogeneity between individuals.”

Data from a greater number of participants would be more convincing, but the two studies together do suggest that enhanced transport through aerosols at least partly contributes to the variant’s contagiousness, she said.

Munster’s study did not involve people at all, but Syrian hamsters. Using the animals allowed the team to control the experimental conditions tightly and focus only on the movement of aerosols, Munster said.

The researchers separated pairs of hamsters with tubes of different lengths that allowed airflow but no physical contact. They looked at how well the different variants traveled from infected “donor” hamsters to uninfected “sentinel” hamsters.

When the cages were more than 2 meters apart, only the smallest aerosols — particles smaller than 5 microns — were shown to infect the sentinel hamsters. And the team found, as expected, that the alpha variant outcompeted the original virus in infecting the sentinel hamsters.

The results were posted on bioRxiv, a website that features papers before they have been published in a scientific journal.

The researchers are now testing the delta variant and expect to find that it is even more efficient, Munster said.

Together, the new findings underscore the importance of masks for vaccinated people, especially in crowded spaces, experts said. Although people with breakthrough infections after vaccination are much less likely to spread the virus than unvaccinated people, the contagiousness of the variants raises the probability.

With billions of people worldwide vaccinated, and billions still unvaccinated, the virus may still change in unexpected ways, Munster said: “There might be additional evolutionary pressures, shaping the evolutionary direction of this virus.”

© 2021 The New York Times Company

 

Engineered cyanobacteria uses electricity to turn carbon dioxide into fuel

by Bob Yirka , Tech Xplore

Graphical abstract. Credit: DOI: 10.1039/D1EE01526E

A combined team of researchers from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory and Miami University, has developed an engineering process that allows cyanobacteria to use electricity to turn carbon dioxide into ethylene or acetate. In their paper published in the journal Energy & Environmental Science, the group describes their technique and its possible use as an energy storage system.

As the researchers note, natural photosynthesis is an inefficient means for converting carbon dioxide to useful compounds for human purposes. In this new effort, the researchers have engineered part of the process to make it more efficient, and in so doing have developed a new way to store energy.

Scientists have divided natural photosynthesis into two main systems, photosystem I and photosystem II. Photosystem I involves the use of light to allow the transfer of electrons across a membrane. With photosystem II, enzymes capture photons that in turn energize electrons. The researchers noted that this system suffers from three main inefficiencies. The first is that the photosystems have overlapping absorption spectra. The second is that the oxygen produced by photosystem II has to compete with carbon dioxide for the enzyme that fixes the carbon pathway. And finally, natural photosynthesis can only use light in a limited part of the solar spectrum.

To overcome these inefficiencies, the researchers engineered cyanobacteria (a type of bacteria that obtain energy via photosynthesis, aka blue-green algae) in a way that allowed them to use sunlight and a stream of electrons to drive carbon dioxide fixation. More specifically, they removed all of photosystem II and replaced it with an artificial system that worked by attaching the modified cells to an electrical circuit. They found that when the cells were exposed to light, the cyanobacteria were able to deliver electrons to photosystem I, which allowed for converting carbon dioxide to useful fuels such as ethylene or acetate.

The researchers note that if a renewable resource was used as the source of the electricity, the system could be used as a means of energy storage. And, the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide could be used to produce greener fuels. More work is required, however, to find out how well the system could be scaled up to useful levels.

New energy conversion layer for biosolar cells

More information: Zhaodong Li et al, Exogenous electricity flowing through cyanobacterial photosystem I drives CO2 valorization with high energy efficiency, Energy & Environmental Science (2021). DOI: 10.1039/D1EE01526E

Journal information: Energy & Environmental Science 

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