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Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram suffer worldwide outage

By The Associated Press

 In this March 29, 2018, file photo, the logo for Facebook appears on screens at the Nasdaq MarketSite in New York's Times Square. Facebook prematurely turned off safeguards designed to thwart misinformation and rabble rousing after Joe Biden defeated Donald Trump in the 2020 elections in a moneymaking move that a company whistleblower alleges contributed to the deadly Jan. 6, 2021, invasion of the U.S. Capitol. (AP Photo/Richard Drew, File)

Facebook and its Instagram and WhatsApp platforms were down across wide swathes of the world Monday. Facebook’s internal systems used by employees also went down.

The company said it was aware that “some people are having trouble accessing (the) Facebook app” and it was working on restoring access. Regarding the internal failures, Adam Mosseri, the head of Instagram, tweeted that it feels like a “snow day.”

The company did not say what might be causing the outage, which began around 11:45 ET. It is normal for websites and apps to suffer outages, though one on a global scale is rare. Users reported being unable to access Facebook in California, New York and Europe.

Whistleblower: Facebook chose profit over public safety

Doug Madory, director of internet analysis for Kentik Inc., said it appears that the routes Facebook advertises online that tell the entire internet how to reach its properties are not available.

Madory said it looks like the DNS routes that Facebook makes available to the networking world have been withdrawn. The Domain Name System is an integral element of how traffic on the internet is routed. DNS translates an address like “facebook.com” to an IP address like 123.45.67.890. If Facebook’s DNS records have disappeared, no one could find it.

Facebook is going through a separate major crisis after whistleblower Frances Haugen, a former Facebook product manager, provided The Wall Street Journal with internal documents that exposed the company’s awareness of harms caused by of its products and decisions. Haugen went public on “60 Minutes” on Sunday.

Haugen also anonymously filed complaints with federal law enforcement alleging that Facebook’s own research shows how it magnifies hate and misinformation, leads to increased polarization and that Instagram, specifically, can harm teenage girls’ mental health.

The Journal’s stories, called “The Facebook Files,” painted a picture of a company focused on growth and its own interests over the public good. Facebook has tried to play down the research. Nick Clegg, the company’s vice president of policy and public affairs, wrote to Facebook employees in a memo Friday that “social media has had a big impact on society in recent years, and Facebook is often a place where much of this debate plays out.”

Twitter, meanwhile, chimed in from the company’s main Twitter account, posting “hello literally everyone” as jokes and memes about the Facebook outage flooded the platform.

GOP OUTTA STEP (AGAIN)

Most people in US favor Afghan ally refugees: AP-NORC poll

About 7 in 10 Americans favor accepting Afghan allies as refugees

By ELLEN KNICKMEYER, HANNAH FINGERHUT and NATHAN ELLGREN

 In this Sept. 27, 2021, file photo a female member of the military puts her arms around two female Afghan refugees after they spoke with Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin as he visits an Afghan refugee camp on Joint Base McGuire Dix Lakehurst, N.J. A survey from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research finds 72% of Americans favor granting refugee status to people who worked with the U.S. or Afghan governments during the war, if they pass security checks. 

(AP Photo/Andrew Harnik, File)

WASHINGTON (AP) — Most people in the U.S. want to see Afghans who worked with Americans offered resettlement in the United States, a new poll shows, confirming support across political divides for former military translators and others struggling to escape Taliban rule.

The survey from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research finds 72% of Americans say they favor the U.S. granting refugee status to people who worked with the U.S. or Afghan governments during the war in Afghanistan, if they pass security checks.

For officials of refugee resettlement groups, veterans and others working to get Afghan allies on planes out of Afghanistan, the poll findings bear out what they are seeing on the ground: Large numbers of Americans regard giving the Afghans a refuge from any Taliban retaliation as a duty and a necessary coda of the nearly 20-year war.

Patrick Raglow, a local Catholic Charities executive director in Oklahoma City preparing for at least 1,800 Afghan refugees in the state, said he is fielding hundreds of community offers of help and support for the Afghan immigrants.

About 7 in 10 Americans favor accepting Afghan allies as refugees

Oklahoma farmers and ranchers have even volunteered to donate a few acres for the Afghan families to homestead, Raglow said.

“I see this very much as a continuation of the mission of those brave 13 Americans who gave their lives, protecting and sheltering and bringing to safety these very people,” Raglow said of the resettlement, invoking the U.S. service members killed when a suicide bomber targeted the U.S.-run evacuation at Kabul’s airport on Aug. 26, an attack that also killed 169 Afghans. “It is a way to continue that mission.”

Matt Zeller, an Afghanistan war veteran and founder of the veterans group No One Left Behind, said he has also seen widespread support for Afghan refugees.

“I don’t think there’s any more unified issue that the American public has had since 9/11,” said Zeller, whose group is part of a civil society effort encompassing veterans, liberal suburbanites and hardcore conservatives, Democratic and Republican lawmakers and others that has mobilized to get more at-risk Afghans out of the Taliban-held country.

Zeller and others are frustrated that U.S. airlifts and subsequent private flights — handicapped by the Taliban and by U.S. bureaucracy — have evacuated only a fraction of the thousands of Afghans potentially eligible for special immigrant visas.

A new AP-NORC poll finds most Americans favor accepting Afghans who worked with the U.S. or Afghan governments as refugees if they pass checks, but fewer say that for others who fear living under Taliban rule.

In a time of sharp political divide, about three-quarters of both Republicans and Democrats support granting refugee status to Afghans who worked with the U.S. or Afghan governments. Overall, just 9% of Americans say they are opposed.

“We owe it to them,” said Andrew Davis, a 62-year-old Republican and Army veteran in Galloway, Ohio. “It’d be dangerous for them to stay there, I think, if they helped us.”

More favor than oppose the U.S. taking in other Afghans if they pass security checks, the survey showed. Still, fewer than half, 42%, support that category of refugees, while 26% are opposed. An additional 31% say they’re neither in favor nor opposed.

More Democrats than Republicans support refugee status for others who fear living in the Taliban-ruled country, 57% to 27%. Twenty percent of Democrats are opposed, while 23% are neither in favor nor opposed. Among Republicans, 38% are opposed and 35% hold neither opinion.

Davis said he supported accepting former Afghan employees of the U.S. or Afghan governments and was open to doing the same for other Afghans who felt in danger from the Taliban. But he stressed the importance of security vetting for all Afghan refugees to screen out any security risks.

“If we can do that ... I do think we should take them in,” he said. “I mean, they’re obviously at threat.”

POSTMODERN BODY (DNA) SNATCHING
Henrietta Lacks estate sues company using her ‘stolen’ cells

By MICHAEL KUNZELMAN

This April 26, 2007, file photo, shows the exterior of Thermo Fisher Scientific Inc., in Waltham, Mass. The estate of Henrietta Lacks sued a pharmaceutical company on Monday, Oct. 4, 2021, that it says has been selling cells that doctors at Johns Hopkins took from the Black woman from Maryland in 1951 without her knowledge or consent. The federal lawsuit filed Monday in Baltimore says Thermo Fisher Scientific Inc., of Rockville, Maryland, knowingly mass produced and sold tissue that was taken from Lack. (AP Photo/Stephan Savoia, File)


COLLEGE PARK, Md. (AP) — The estate of Henrietta Lacks sued a biotechnology company on Monday, accusing it of selling cells that doctors at Johns Hopkins Hospital took from the Black woman in 1951 without her knowledge or consent as part of “a racially unjust medical system.”

Tissue taken from the woman’s tumor before she died of cervical cancer became the first human cells to be successfully cloned. Reproduced infinitely ever since, HeLa cells have become a cornerstone of modern medicine, enabling countless scientific and medical innovations, including the development of the polio vaccine, genetic mapping and even COVID-19 vaccines.

Lacks’ cells were harvested and developed long before the advent of consent procedures used in medicine and scientific research today, but lawyers for her family say Thermo Fisher Scientific Inc., of Waltham, Massachusetts, has continued to commercialize the results well after the origins of the HeLa cell line became well known.

“It is outrageous that this company would think that they have intellectual rights property to their grandmother’s cells. Why is it they have intellectual rights to her cells and can benefit billions of dollars when her family, her flesh and blood, her Black children, get nothing?” one of the family’s attorneys, Ben Crump, said Monday at a news conference outside the federal courthouse in Baltimore.

Johns Hopkins said it never sold or profited from the cell lines, but many companies have patented ways of using them. Crump said these distributors have made billions from the genetic material “stolen” from Lacks’ body.

Another family attorney, Christopher Seeger, hinted at related claims against other companies.

Thermo Fisher Scientific “shouldn’t feel too alone because they’re going to have a lot of company soon,” Seeger said.

The lawsuit asks the court to order Thermo Fisher Scientific to “disgorge the full amount of its net profits obtained by commercializing the HeLa cell line to the Estate of Henrietta Lacks.” It also wants Thermo Fisher Scientific to be permanently enjoined from using HeLa cells without the estate’s permission.

On its website, the company says it generates approximately $35 billion in annual revenue. A company spokesman reached by telephone didn’t immediately comment on the lawsuit.

HeLa cells were discovered to have unique properties. While most cell samples died shortly after being removed from the body, her cells survived and thrived in laboratories. This exceptional quality made it possible to cultivate her cells indefinitely — they became known as the first immortalized human cell line — making it possible for scientists anywhere to reproduce studies using identical cells.

The remarkable science involved — and the impact on the Lacks family, some of whom suffered from chronic illnesses without health insurance — were documented in a 2010 bestselling book, “The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks.” Oprah Winfrey portrayed her daughter in an HBO movie about the story. The lawsuit was filed exactly 70 years after the day she died, on Oct. 4, 1951.

“The exploitation of Henrietta Lacks represents the unfortunately common struggle experienced by Black people throughout history,” the suit says. “Indeed, Black suffering has fueled innumerable medical progress and profit, without just compensation or recognition. Various studies, both documented and undocumented, have thrived off the dehumanization of Black people.”

Shobita Parthasarathy, a University of Michigan professor of public policy who has researched issues around intellectual property in biotechnology, said the lawsuit comes at a time when Lacks’ family is likely to have a sympathetic audience for their claims.

“We are at a moment, not just after the murder of George Floyd but also the pandemic, where we have seen structural racism in action in all sorts of places,” she said. “We keep talking about a racial reckoning, and that racial reckoning is happening in science and medicine, as well.”

Parthasarathy said the case also comes amid revelations about how tech companies are profiting from mining customers’ data.

“I think it’s raising questions for all of us about whether or not our structures of informed consent are adequate to deal with the realities of how data is being taken from us and used either to sell us things or to make companies money,” she said.

A group of white doctors at Johns Hopkins in the 1950s preyed on Black women with cervical cancer, cutting away tissue samples from their patients’ cervixes without their patients’ knowledge or consent, the lawsuit says.

Johns Hopkins Medicine says it reviewed its interactions with Lacks and her family over more than 50 years after the 2010 publication Rebecca Skloot’s book. It says it “has never sold or profited from the discovery or distribution of HeLa cells and does not own the rights to the HeLa cell line,” but it has acknowledged an ethical responsibility.

“At several points across those decades, we found that Johns Hopkins could have — and should have — done more to inform and work with members of Henrietta Lacks’ family out of respect for them, their privacy and their personal interests,” Johns Hopkins Medicine says on its website.

Crump, a Florida-based civil rights attorney, has risen to national prominence representing the families of Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Breonna Taylor and George Floyd -- Black people whose deaths at the hands of police and vigilantes helped revitalize a national movement toward police reform and racial justice.

Seeger, a New Jersey-based corporate litigator, has represented thousands of former NFL players in a class action settlement over concussions and was a lead negotiator of Volkswagen’s $21 billion diesel emissions settlement with car owners.

KILLER KOPS
Former French officer connected to cold case slayings, rapes through DNA

Oct. 1 (UPI) -- French prosecutors have identified a former police officer as the person behind a series of slayings and rapes dating back 35 years.

The former officer François Vérove, who also served as a gendarmes, or military officer, left a letter confessing to the crimes before killing himself this week.

Paris public prosecutor Laure Beccuau said Thursday that DNA tests "established a link between the genetic profile found at several crime scenes and that of the dead man."

According to a statement from the prosecutor viewed by CNN, Vérove was behind five crimes dating between 1986 and 1994, including the "rape of 15-year-old minors, murders, attempted homicide, armed robberies, wrongful use of title, and kidnapping and false imprisonment of a 15-year-old.

"
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The Guardian reported that the suspect evaded detection for decades, but cold case investigators recently determined a gendarme was behind the crimes. They summoned hundreds of former gendarmes for questioning, including Vérove.

French media reported that Vérove's note said he wasn't in a good state at the time of the crimes, but didn't indicate a motive.

The Guardian reported that Vérove identified himself as a police officer to multiple women while carrying out the abductions and rapes. Among those killed were an 11-year-old girl he allegedly abducted from the elevator of her building and raped before leaving her body in the basement. Investigators also linked him to the assault and slaying of a German au pair and her male boss in a Paris apartment.

Didier Seban, a lawyer for the victims' families, said family members had suspected a police officer or gendarme in the crimes because of his use of police techniques in subduing his victims.

"We are going to ask the justice system to continue investigating, to know if he had accomplices and to determine the number of victims," he said. "The families must have answers."

WHITE AMERIKAN TERRORISM

Muslims recall questionable detentions that followed 9/11

“There were people who were just disappearing from our communities, and nobody knew what was happening to them or where they were going.”

By GARY FIELDS and NOREEN NASIR

1 of 7

In this Sept. 12, 2021, photo Egyptian Yasser Ebrahim, who was detained in New York following the Sept. 11 attacks, held under no charges and ultimately deported, poses for a photograph in his home, in Alexandria, Egypt. He was an original plaintiff in a 2002 lawsuit. In 2009 he and four others, including his brother, reached a $1.26 million settlement on the lawsuit. Though not an apology, “we thought it was sort of admitting that something wrong was done to us.” (AP Photo/Ravy Shaker)

WASHINGTON (AP) — Around New York City in the weeks after the Sept. 11 attacks, as an eerie quiet settled over ground zero, South Asian and Arab men started vanishing.

Soon, more than 1,000 were arrested in sweeps across the metropolitan area and nationwide.

Most were charged only with overstaying visas and deported back to their home countries. But before that happened, many were held in detention for months, with little outside contact, especially with their families. Others would live with a different anxiety, forced to sign what was effectively a Muslim registry with no idea what might follow.

While the remembrances and memorials of 9/11′s 20th anniversary slip into the past, hundreds of Muslim men and their families face difficult 20-year anniversaries of their own.


In the attacks’ aftermath, the immigrant advocacy group Desis Rising Up and Moving, or DRUM, anticipated a rise in hate crimes and harassment. So it set up a hotline and placed flyers primarily in South Asian neighborhoods.

“We started getting calls from women saying, ‘Last night, law enforcement busted into our apartment and took my husband and my brother.’ Children calling us and saying, ‘My father left for work four days ago and he hasn’t come home, and we haven’t heard anything,’” executive director Fahd Ahmed recalls.



“There were people who were just disappearing from our communities,” he says, “and nobody knew what was happening to them or where they were going.”

They were, according to the 9/11 Commission report, arrested as “special interest” detainees. Immigration hearings were closed, detainee communication was limited and bond was denied until the detainees were cleared of terrorist connections. Identities were kept secret.

A review conducted by the Justice Department’s Office of the Inspector General said the Justice Department’s “hold until cleared” policy meant a significant percentage of the detainees stayed for months despite immigration officials questioning the legality of the prolonged detentions and even though there were no indications they were connected to terrorism. Compounding that, they faced “a pattern of physical and verbal abuse” particularly at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn, New York. Conditions were, the report said, “unduly harsh.”

Detainees were swept up a myriad of ways, the report said. Three were stopped on a traffic violation and found with school drafting plans. Their boss explained they were working on a construction project and were supposed to have them, but authorities arrested and detained them anyway. Another was arrested because he seemed too anxious to buy a car.

Although many of those who were held had come into the U.S. illegally or overstayed visas, “it was unlikely that most if not all” would have been pursued if not for the attack investigation, the report said.

The “blunderbuss approach” of rounding up Muslims and presuming there would be terrorists among them was “pure racism and xenophobia in operation,” says Rachel Meeropol, senior staff attorney with the Center for Constitutional Rights, who filed a lawsuit in 2002 on behalf of several of the men and continues to fight for additional plaintiffs to this day.

“It shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone that it didn’t work,” Meeropol says. “Of course, what it did do was destroy whole communities and not to mention the lives of all the individuals rounded up.”

___

Yasser Ebrahim, an original plaintiff in the lawsuit, was at a shop in his neighborhood and noticed people intently watching the television. “I saw these images on the screen, and for a moment there was like some kind of a movie or something,” he recalls. “I couldn’t believe what I was seeing.”

He had been in the United States since 1992 and enjoyed his life. “I loved everything about America,” he said by Zoom from Egypt. As a teenager, even before arriving, he idolized American popular culture. “The food, the music, the movies, everything was so attractive, and everybody wanted to go to America,” he said.

After learning the hijackers were Muslims, he reassured his mother in a phone call that he and his brother would be fine. In other countries there might be problems, but America was a place of legal rights, where evidence mattered, he said. “We still had faith in the system in America at that point,” he said.

That ended on Sept. 30, 2001. Several federal agents showed up at his door in Brooklyn. He says he had requested an extension of his tourist visa, but agents told him they had no record of it. He thought the matter would be straightened out quickly, or he would be deported. He stayed in custody until the following June.

For three months, his family did not know what happened to him or his brother. A neighbor ended that mystery, explaining they had been taken into custody. Even then there was little outside communication. And some officers at the facility in Brooklyn were physically and verbally abusive. It was months before he saw his brother. “There was the general feeling that we’re going to be here forever,” he says.

Ebrahim’s brother was deported first. When Ebrahim was finally allowed to leave, he was given clothes several sizes too big, including pants he had to physically hold up with his hands.

He was placed on a plane without knowing the destination. On board, he realized no one looked Egyptian. The plane went to Greece and after spending a night in the custody of Greek authorities, he boarded a flight for Cairo, with no money. Another Egyptian, deported from Texas, gave him $20 to eat and contact his family to let them know he was home.

In 2009 he and four others, including his brother, reached a $1.26 million settlement on the lawsuit. Though not an apology, he says, “we thought it was sort of admitting that something wrong was done to us.”

In this Sept. 20, 2021, photo Rachel Meeropol, senior staff attorney with the Center for Constitutional Rights, who filed a lawsuit in 2002 on behalf of several of the men who were detained and ultimately deported after Sept. 11, poses for a photo in the Brooklyn borough of New York. In the weeks after the Sept. 11 attacks more than 1,000 South Asian and Arab men were arrested in sweeps across the New York City metropolitan area and nationwide. Most were charged only with overstaying visas and deported back to their home countries. But before that happened, many were held in detention for months, with little outside contact, especially with their families. (AP Photo/Noreen Nasir)

Umair Anser was 14 as he and math classmates watched on a classroom television as the twin towers fell.

“You can’t accept something like that happening on American soil,” Anser says. “You know you’re safe in the U.S. … but then something like that happens and you really question how safe you are, especially when you’re that young.”

His father, Anser Mehmood, left Pakistan in 1988 during a time of political turmoil, looking toward the safety and promise of the United States. He worked as a truck driver and sometimes drove a taxi. The family settled in Bayonne, New Jersey.

Anser came home from school on Oct. 3, 2001, and found his mom nearly catatonic, his home ransacked and the family’s computers and his father gone. His uncle had disappeared in a similar way days earlier.

“We didn’t know where our father was for the next three months,” Anser says.

He was, it turned out, in solitary confinement — in the special housing unit of Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn, the same place chronicled by the inspector general, Anser says. When the family did see him again, they encountered a different man. “He was so weak … I couldn’t see my dad like that,” Anser says. “It was very emotional for me.”

For the remainder of his detention, he wrote letters, talked about the difficulties and told his family to be strong and support their mother. “He told us, ‘Allah is there for us. He will be the provider; everything will be OK.’ I think he had to give us hope so we didn’t lose hope.”

Anser and his brothers attended protests with their mother organized by DRUM. But with their father gone, there was no financial support for the family. The sons were bullied at school; neighbors harassed them at home. It became untenable and the family returned to Pakistan, leaving Mehmood behind, in jail.

“My mother was extremely heartbroken to leave the country because she knew the amount of effort and the amount of work that my father put in to make everything happen for us,” Anser says.

Mehmood eventually pleaded guilty to working with an unauthorized Social Security number and was sentenced to eight months in prison. He was transferred to Passaic County Jail before finally being deported on May 10, 2002, to Pakistan, where the family now lives.

___

For Sultana Jahangir, there was a different anxiety.

It was one that intensified when her husband, Mohammed Alam, was called to register through the National Security Entry-Exit Registration System, or NSEERS, a government policy introduced in 2002 as part of the war on terror. Some would call it a “Muslim registry.”

It required all noncitizen males 16 or older from 25 countries to register with the U.S. government. The only country among them that did not have an Arab or Muslim majority was North Korea.

Jahangir, now living in Toronto with her husband and family, came to the U.S. in 1994 from Bangladesh to visit her sister. During their stay, her sister’s husband died unexpectedly, and Jahangir and her husband stayed to help.

“We worked like crazy … many days, I wouldn’t see the sun,” she says. “The evening comes, I don’t see the sunset. My life was stuck in a dark place.”

They worked quietly this way for years — Jahangir at a cafe, Alam driving taxis — all the while trying to apply for political asylum.

In the days that followed the Sept. 11 attacks, Jahangir’s co-worker called her “Bin Laden’s sister.” Shortly after, her manager let her go. She struggled to find work after that. “Nobody,” she says, “wanted to hire a Muslim then.”

Meanwhile, she and her family would hear reports of Muslim men being taken off the street by law enforcement without explanation, and they worried for Alam.

When Alam responded to the call to register for NSEERS, he was held for hours and then released with a deportation order. Paranoid about what might follow, he retreated from public life. “It didn’t feel safe for him to go out and drive the taxi,” Jahangir says. “We discouraged him from going out. He stayed home with the children and I had to take on more responsibility.”

Ultimately, the family was able to avoid being deported to Bangladesh by arranging a visa for Canada.

In the end, NSEERS resulted in no terrorism convictions. It was suspended in 2011 and completely dissolved in 2016. It did, however, land more than 13,000 boys and men in deportation proceedings.

___

Two decades later, no terror attack in the U.S. has come close to the scale of Sept. 11. The most serious threats have come from lone wolves. The most public of threats have been from Americans, not foreigners.

Joshua Dratel, co-chair of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers’ national security committee, says the detentions are a foundational piece of something troubling — an acceptance of more invasive law enforcement for protection from terrorists.

Searches at airports, in buildings, even on subways — “these are things that were once exceptional and extraordinary, and now the exception has become the norm. I think that has put us in a position of vulnerability to more of it and a more malevolent version of it.”

Shirin Sinnar, a law professor at Stanford University, says the extreme measures taken after 9/11 have been normalized to the point that “now we don’t even talk about them. They’ve just become part of the kinds of surveillance and deprivation of rights and profiling that we expect to see.”

The positive, she says: More people seem willing to challenge that.

To a degree, that is true. Attitudes have trended toward people being more wary of the government’s counterterrorism efforts. But a recent poll by The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research shows that a majority of Americans, 54%, still believe it is sometimes necessary to sacrifice rights and freedom to fight terrorism.

The long-running lawsuit in which additional plaintiffs were added after the first five were awarded a settlement has continued. It has ricocheted through the court system with mixed results. In 2017 the Supreme Court threw out parts of the suit but allowed one part to stand, sending it back to lower courts. Last month, a federal district court judge in Brooklyn dismissed the lawsuit.

Meeropol says the initial settlement was proof that the plaintiffs had a compelling case. She says no decision has been made yet on an appeal. That leaves a striking fact: Nearly 20 years later, no individuals have been held accountable for how the detainees were treated, she says.

For the families marking an ignominious anniversary, the question is basic and broad: What is different?

Jahangir runs a South Asian women’s rights organization in Toronto, continuing her fight against systemic racism and discrimination. She misses seeing her sister but has no desire to step foot in America again. “I look at my 10 years in the U.S. as a black hole for me, (and) after 9/11, I found out that this is not a place to live.”

Ebrahim, now 49 and owner of a company that provides coding and other outsource services to other companies, shared Jahangir’s anger after he returned to Egypt. But two decades later, he would consider bringing his teenage son to New York City to see sights and sounds that he found “charming.”

His advice for U.S. citizens: “Never twist the Constitution again. What makes America America is the freedom, and the Constitution.”

___

Nasir reported from New York City.

CATHOLIC CRIMINAL CAPITALI$M
At Vatican trial, defense questions the legal system itself


FILE - In this Friday, Sept. 25, 2020 file photo, Cardinal Angelo Becciu talks to journalists during a press conference in Rome. Defense lawyers are questioning the very legitimacy of the Vatican tribunal where 10 people are on trial, including Becciu, on finance-related charges, arguing their clients can’t get a fair trial in an absolute monarchy where the pope has already intervened in the case and where prosecutors have failed to turn over key pieces of evidence. (AP Photo/Gregorio Borgia, File)


VATICAN CITY (AP) — Defense lawyers are questioning the legitimacy of the Vatican tribunal where 10 people are on trial on finance-related charges, arguing their clients can’t get a fair trial in an absolute monarchy where the pope has already intervened in the case and where prosecutors have failed to turn over key evidence.

In defense motions ahead of the trial’s resumption on Tuesday, lawyers have alleged numerous procedural violations by prosecutors that they say should nullify the indictment. They have questioned what redress they have, since the Holy See has never signed any international convention guaranteeing fair trials or providing recourse to the European Court of Human Rights.

“These are harmful to the right of the defense that affect the right to a fair trial,” said Fabio Viglione, attorney for Cardinal Angelo Becciu, the lone cardinal on trial.

The trial concerns the Holy See’s 350 million euro investment in a London property deal but has expanded to include other alleged financial crimes. During the preliminary hearing in July, defense lawyers had balked that they had only had a few days to read the 28,000 pages of evidence gathered by prosecutors over two years to understand the accusations against their clients. Key documents were either missing or couldn’t be accessed.

The tribunal president, Giuseppe Pignatone, ordered the pope’s prosecutors to make the documents available as well as a key missing piece of evidence: the videotaped interrogations of the prosecutors’ prime suspect-turned-star witness, Monsignor Alberto Perlasca. He was the Vatican official most intimately involved in the London real estate deal that lost the Holy See tens of millions of euros, much of it donations from the faithful, spent on fees to Italian brokers who are accused of defrauding the pope.

Perlasca’s five spontaneous declarations were so important to the prosecution’s case that they apparently spared him indictment and formed the basis of several charges against the defendants. One led to a witness-tampering charge against Becciu.

But the prosecutors refused to abide by Pignatone’s order to produce Perlasca’s videotaped testimony, citing his right to privacy. The defense has only seen a summary of Perlasca’s account, and Becciu’s legal team only learned of the witness-tampering accusation when the indictment was handed down on July 3.

In a defense memo submitted last week and obtained by The Associated Press, lawyers representing another defendant, Cecilia Marogna, said such behavior by prosecutors to refuse an order of the tribunal president would never be tolerated in an Italian court.

“In a normal situation, in all countries having a judicial system that could be considered autonomous and impartial and structured in a way to safeguard a fair trial, the refusal would have been immediately sanctioned,” said the memo by international law expert, Riccardo Sindoca.

On Sept. 21, prosecutors also informed the defense and the tribunal that, due to “internal organizational problems,” they couldn’t meet Pignatone’s deadline to provide forensic copies of data from cellphones, laptops and other electronic devices that had been seized from the defendants.

Sindoca’s motion also argued that the tribunal judges can’t be considered truly impartial or independent since Pope Francis hired them and can fire them, and that they took oaths to be “loyal to and obey” the pope, not the law as is the case for judges in Italy. As an absolute monarch, Francis wields supreme legislative, executive and judicial power in Vatican City.

The defense is not alone in finding structural problems in the Vatican tribunal. In June, the Council of Europe’s Moneyval evaluators faulted the Vatican’s reliance on part-time, temporary prosecutors and judges who also practice in Italy, warning that they might have conflicts of interest.

AP asked the prosecutors’ office in January about possible conflicts of interest, and was told the question was “totally specious and devoid of any technical basis.” Saying there had never been a conflict, the prosecutors said their work in Italy as registered lawyers “is only evidence of the professionalism they have achieved.”

Francis, for his part, has insisted that the Vatican judiciary has “become more independent” in recent years and has pointed to the trial as evidence that his financial transparency reforms are working. Yet Francis also boasted that he personally intervened to encourage the two Vatican officials who raised red flags about irregularities in the London deal to make formal complaints to prosecutors.

In his zeal, Francis then issued four separate executive decrees during the two-year investigation giving prosecutors sweeping powers to investigate even “where necessary to derogate from” existing laws, to conduct wiretaps and to suspend Vatican confidentiality rules for documents.

Defense lawyer Luigi Panella, representing the Vatican’s longtime money manager Enrico Crasso, argued during the opening hearing that such interference from the executive power, and the carte blanche Francis gave prosecutors to disregard existing laws, amounted to the creation of an ad hoc “special tribunal,” which is expressly outlawed in Italy.

Prosecutors, for their part, insisted that the defense rights had all been respected, defended the legitimacy of the trial and Francis’ executive decrees and reminded lawyers that the church’s canon law forms the basis of Vatican law, not Italian legislation. Prosecutor Alessandro Diddi acknowledged during the July hearing that if there were procedural errors, he was ready to remedy them.

Backing him up, attorney Paola Severino, who is representing the Secretariat of State as an injured party in the case, called for the defense motions to be dismissed.

In addition to the executive decrees, Francis has also intervened personally in the case. He essentially declared Becciu guilty last year when he forced his resignation as head of the Vatican’s saint-making office, citing a 100,000 euro transfer of Vatican money to a diocesan charity run by his brother.

Becciu is now on trial for that transfer, but Francis recently told the COPE broadcaster of the Spanish bishops conference he hopes “with all my heart,” that Becciu is found innocent.

“He was a collaborator of mine and helped me a lot,” Francis told COPE. “ My wish is that it turns out well.”

GOP STATES TRICKLE DOWN ECONOMICS
AP: States and cities slow to spend federal pandemic money

By DAVID A. LIEB

yesterday

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In this Friday, Oct. 1, 2021 photo, from left, Zihare Wellons, 7, Shahif Wellons, 12, and Janiyah Acie, 3 walk through new Rec2Tech space at Jefferson Recreation Center, which will provide access to technology and innovative programming for community members including STEM, computer science and coding education, combined with the arts in Pittsburgh. The city plans to use some of the money from the American Rescue Plan, passed by Congress last spring, to continue expanding these programs. Initial programming will be for young people, with plans to grow the programming into the broader community. (AP Photo/Rebecca Droke)

As Congress considered a massive COVID-19 relief package earlier this year, hundreds of mayors from across the U.S. pleaded for “immediate action” on billions of dollars targeted to shore up their finances and revive their communities.

Now that they’ve received it, local officials are taking their time before actually spending the windfall.

As of this summer, a majority of large cities and states hadn’t spent a penny from the American Rescue Plan championed by Democrats and President Joe Biden, according to an Associated Press review of the first financial reports due under the law. States had spent just 2.5% of their initial allotment while large cities spent 8.5%, according to the AP analysis.

Many state and local governments reported they were still working on plans for their share of the $350 billion, which can be spent on a wide array of programs.

Though Biden signed the law in March, the Treasury Department didn’t release the money and spending guidelines until May. By then, some state legislatures already had wrapped up their budget work for the next year, leaving governors with no authority to spend the new money. Some states waited several more months to ask the federal government for their share.

Cities sometimes delayed decisions while soliciting suggestions from the public. And some government officials — still trying to figure out how to spend previous rounds of federal pandemic aid — simply didn’t see an urgent need for the additional cash.

“It’s a lot of money that’s been put out there. I think it’s a good sign that it hasn’t been frivolously spent,” Louisville Mayor Greg Fischer said. He was president of the U.S. Conference of Mayors when more than 400 mayors signed a letter urging Congress to quickly pass Biden’s plan.

The law gives states until the end of 2024 to make spending commitments and the end of 2026 to spend the money. Any money not obligated or spent by those dates must be returned to the federal government.

The Biden administration said it isn’t concerned about the early pace of the initiative. The aid to governments is intended both “to address any crisis needs” and to provide “longer-term fire power to ensure a durable and equitable recovery,” said Gene Sperling, White House American Rescue Plan coordinator.

“The fact that you can spread your spending out is a feature, not a bug, of the program. It is by design,” Sperling told the AP.

The Treasury Department set an aggressive reporting schedule to try to prod local planning. It required states, counties and cities with estimated populations of at least 250,000 to file reports by Aug. 31 detailing their spending as of the previous month as well as future plans.

More than half the states and nearly two-thirds of the roughly 90 largest cities reported no initial spending. The governments reported future plans for about 40% of their total funds. The AP did not gather reports from counties because of the large number of them.

To promote transparency, the Treasury Department also required governments to post the reports on a “prominent public-facing website,” such as their home page or a general coronavirus response site. But the AP found that many governments ignored that directive, instead tucking the documents behind numerous navigational steps. Idaho and Nebraska had not posted their reports online when contacted by the AP. Neither had some cities.

Officials in Jersey City, New Jersey, required the AP to file a formal open-records request to get its report, though that shouldn’t have been necessary. City employees in Laredo, Texas, and Sacramento, California, also initially directed the AP to file open-records requests. Laredo later told the AP it had spent nothing. Sacramento relented and eventually provided a short report stating it had spent nothing but might put its entire $112 million allocation toward replacing lost revenue and providing government services.

Among states, the largest share of initial spending went toward shoring up unemployment insurance trust funds that were depleted during the pandemic. Arizona reported pouring nearly $759 million into its unemployment account, New Mexico nearly $657 million and Kentucky almost $506 million.

For large cities, the most common use of the money was to replenish their diminished revenue and fund government services. San Francisco reported using its entire initial allotment of $312 million for that purpose.

Those reporting no initial spending included Pittsburgh, whose mayor joined with several other Pennsylvania mayors in February on a column urging Congress to pass “crucial” aid for state and local governments.

“Congress must act, and they must act soon. Our communities cannot wait another day,” the Pennsylvania mayors wrote.

Pittsburgh ultimately ended up waiting to spend the money until the Treasury guidelines were released, community members had a chance to comment and the City Council could sign off on the spending plans. In the future, the city plans to use part of its federal windfall to buy 78 electric vehicles, build technology labs at recreation centers and launch a pilot project paying 100 low-income Black women $500 a month for two years to test the merits of a guaranteed income program.

The federal money also will help pay the salaries of more than 600 city employees

“Even though the money hadn’t technically been expended” by the Treasury Department’s reporting timeline, “the receipt of the money was enough for us to hold off on major layoffs,” said Dan Gilman, chief of staff to Pittsburgh Mayor William Peduto.

Some officials are intentionally taking their time.

Missouri Gov. Mike Parson, a Republican, opted not to call a special session to appropriate money from the latest federal pandemic relief act. So far, he’s publicly outlined just one proposal — $400 million for broadband.

Parson’s budget director said the administration will present more ideas to lawmakers when they convene for their regular session in January. Until then, the state should have enough money left from a previous federal relief law to cover the costs of fighting the virus, budget director Dan Haug said.

“We want to try to find things that are going to benefit Missouri not just next year or the year after, but 10 or 20 years down the road,” Haug said. “That takes some thought and some planning.”

Republican state Rep. Doug Richey, who leads a House panel on federal stimulus spending, said he’s not convinced Missouri needs to spend all of its American Rescue Plan funds.

“To the extent that we spend these dollars, we are participating in an ever-increasing federal debt or bad monetary policy,” Richey said.

Missouri was one several states that waited to request its initial allotment. Five other Republican-led states — Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee and Texas — waited so long that they weren’t required to file reports by the Treasury’s Aug. 31 deadline.

Tennessee wanted to make sure small cities were prepared for a 30-day clock that starts ticking for them to seek funding once the dollars arrive at the state, said Lola Potter, a spokesperson for the state Department of Finance and Administration. A South Dakota official cited similar reasoning for the delay. Financial Systems Director Colin Keeler said it’s difficult for small towns to take the steps needed to apply.

“The state was in no rush at all,” he said. “The cities wanted to get theirs, but we needed to be prepared

In this March 8, 2021 photo provided by the Missouri House of Representatives, Missouri state Rep. Doug Richey speaks during a House debate at the state Capitol in Jefferson City, Mo. Richey, a Republican, leads a House panel on federal stimulus spending. Richey said he is not convinced yet that Missouri needs to spend its full allotment of money from President Joe Biden's COVID-19 relief law, the American Rescue Plan. (Tim Bommel/Missouri House of Representatives via AP)

STATEHOOD OR INDEPENDENCE

Puerto Ricans fume as outages threaten health, work, school

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A wooden Puerto Rican flag is displayed on the dock of the Condado lagoon, where multiple selective blackouts have been recorded in the past days, in San Juan, Puerto Rico, Thursday, Sept. 30, 2021. Power outages across the island have surged in recent weeks, with some lasting up to several days. (AP Photo/Carlos Giusti)


SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico (AP) — Not a single hurricane has hit Puerto Rico this year, but hundreds of thousands of people in the U.S. territory feel like they’re living in the aftermath of a major storm: Students do homework by the light of dying cellphones, people who depend on insulin or respiratory therapies struggle to find power sources and the elderly are fleeing sweltering homes amid record high temperatures.

Power outages across the island have surged in recent weeks, with some lasting several days. Officials have blamed everything from seaweed to mechanical failures as the government calls the situation a “crass failure” that urgently needs to be fixed.

The daily outages are snarling traffic, frying costly appliances, forcing doctors to cancel appointments, causing restaurants, shopping malls and schools to temporarily close and even prompting one university to suspend classes and another to declare a moratorium on exams.

“This is hell,” said Iris Santiago, a 48-year-old with chronic health conditions who often joins her elderly neighbors outside when their apartment building goes dark and the humid heat soars into the 90s Fahrenheit.

“Like any Puerto Rican, I live in a constant state of anxiety because the power goes out every day,” she said. “Not everyone has family they can run to and go into a home with a generator.”

Santiago recently endured three days without power and had to throw out the eggs, chicken and milk that spoiled in her refrigerator. She said power surges also caused hundreds of dollars of damage to her air conditioner and refrigerator.

Puerto Rico’s Electric Power Authority, which is responsible for the generation of electricity, and Luma, a private company that handles transmission and distribution of power, have blamed mechanical failures at various plants involving components such as boilers and condensers. In one recent incident, seaweed clogged filters and a narrow pipe.

Luma also has implemented selective blackouts in recent weeks that have affected a majority of its 1.5 million clients, saying demand is exceeding supply.

Luma took over transmission and distribution in June. Puerto Rico’s governor said the company had pledged to reduce power interruptions by 30% and the length of outages by 40%.

The island’s Electric Power Authority has long struggled with mismanagement, corruption and, more recently, bankruptcy.

In September 2016, a fire at a power plant sparked an island-wide blackout. A year later, Hurricane Maria hit as a Category 4 storm, shredding the aging power grid and leaving some customers up to a year without power.

Emergency repairs were done, but reconstruction work to strengthen the grid has yet to start.

“We’re on the verge of a collapse,” said Juan Alicea, a former executive director of the authority.



He said three main factors are to blame: Officials halted maintenance of generation units under the erroneous belief they would soon be replaced. Scores of experienced employees have retired. And investment to replace aging infrastructure has dwindled.

Puerto Rico’s power generation units are on average 45 years old, twice those of the U.S. mainland,.

Luma has said it expects to spend $3.85 billion to revamp the transmission and distribution system and company CEO Wayne Stensby said Luma has made significant progress in stabilizing it. He noted that crews have restarted four substations, some of which had been out of operation since Hurricane Maria.

Puerto Rico Gov. Pedro Pierluisi blamed the outages on management failures at the Electric Power Authority and called the repeated failures “untenable.”

Pierluisi himself has faced calls to resign — hundreds gathered to protest near the governor’s mansion on Friday — and many are demanding that the government cancel Luma’s contract.

The president of the power authority’s governing board resigned last week and a new executive director, Josué Colón, was appointed, promising to visit all generation units to pinpoint the problem.

“I recognize the critical condition that they’re in,” he said. “We’re not going to stop until the problem is corrected.”

Some people have taken to banging pots at night in frustration in addition to organizing protests.

Among those planning to join is Carmen Cabrer, a 53-year-old asthmatic and diabetic. She has been unable to use her nebulizer and recently had to throw out insulin for lack of refrigeration. The heat forces her to open her windows and breathe in pollution that aggravates her asthma. She cooks and washes clothes at irregular hours, fearing the power will go out again.

“This has turned into abuse,” she said of the outages. “I’m constantly tense.”

The outages are especially aggravating because power bills have been rising and the pandemic has forced many people to work or study from home.

Barbra Maysonet, a 30-year-old call center operator who works from home, said she sometimes loses an entire shift and doesn’t get paid for lack of power. She’s hesitant to work at the office because she doesn’t want to expose her mother and grandmother to COVID-19.

“It really puts a dent in my paycheck,” she said. “I have to rethink things. ... I’m going to have to risk my health just to be able to pay the rest of the bills.”

Like other Puerto Ricans, Maysonet has modified her diet, turning to canned goods, snacks and crackers that won’t spoil in a power outage.

“Just when I’m about to cook something, the power goes out. Then it’s, ‘I guess I’m having another bowl of cereal,’” she said.

Those who can afford it buy generators or invest in solar panels, but budgets are tight for many on an island mired in a deep economic crisis and a government that is effectively bankrupt.

Even attempts to rely on alternate sources of energy often are frustrated.

Manuel Casellas, an attorney who recently served as president of his 84-unit condominium complex, said the owners agreed to buy a generator more than a year ago at a cost of $100,000. However, they first need a power company official to connect the generator to the grid. He has made four appointments, and said officials canceled them all at the last minute without explanation.

“This has created great annoyance,” he said. “This is a building with many elderly people.”

Casellas himself has at times been unable to work at home or the office because of power outages at both. If he can’t meet with clients, he doesn’t get paid. Like others, he is considering leaving Puerto Rico.

“Every time the power goes out here it pushes your post-traumatic stress button,” he said, referring to the harrowing experiences many went through after Hurricane Maria, with an estimated 2,975 people dying in the aftermath. “You can’t live without electricity.”

AP PHOTOS: In Kenya, ex-accountant now protects sea turtles

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Wilson Saro carries a green turtle that was unintentionally caught in a fisherman's net, before releasing it back into the Watamu National Marine Park on the Indian Ocean coast of Kenya Wednesday, Sept. 22, 2021. Saro and the Local Ocean Conservation group rescue sea turtles that have been caught in fishermen's nets, and then release them back into the marine park or treat injured ones at a rescue center until they are fit. 

(AP Photo/Brian Inganga)

By BRIAN INGANGA

October 2, 2021

WATAMU, Kenya (AP) — As soon as he gets a call from a fisherman who’s accidentally caught a turtle off Kenya’s Indian Ocean coastline, Local Ocean Conservation’s Fikiri Kiponda jumps into his car to save it.

The work is far removed from the 44-year-old’s previous career as an accountant. He now dedicates himself to protecting endangered turtles that face multiple threats — from pollution to being sold for food, traditional medicinal purposes or the making of jewelry.

When Kiponda gets a call for help, he hurries to check the turtle for injuries that need to be treated in the organization’s rehabilitation center. Then it is released back into Watamu National Marine Park.

“The moment I tag a healthy turtle and release it back to the ocean where it is supposed to be, the feeling is just overwhelming,” he said.

Kenya has five species of sea turtles. All are internationally recognized as endangered, and protected under local law with a penalty of life imprisonment.

Local Ocean Conservation works on grassroots solutions with local communities. Kiponda and others regularly visit to speak about the importance of a healthy ocean to livelihoods.

Over 350 fishermen in Watamu have collaborated with the group for years. Previously, when they caught turtles in their nets, they often would kill them for food, traditional medicinal purposes or to keep their shells as trophies.

The ingestion of plastics in the ocean remains another threat to the turtles, causing internal blockages that can be fatal.

Scientists decipher Marie Antoinette’s redacted love notes


This image provided by researchers shows a section of a letter dated Jan. 4, 1792 by Marie-Antoinette, queen of France and wife of Louis XVI, to Swedish count Axel von Fersen, with a phrase (outlined in red) redacted by an unknown censor. The bottom half shows results from an X-ray fluorescence spectroscopy scan on the redacted words. The copper (Cu) section reveals the French words, “non pas sans vous" (“not without you"). (Anne Michelin, Fabien Pottier, Christine Andraud via AP)

By CHRISTINA LARSON

October 1, 2021

WASHINGTON (AP) — “Not without you.” “My dear friend.” “You that I love.”

Marie Antoinette sent these expressions of affection — or more? — in letters to her close friend and rumored lover Axel von Fersen. Someone later used dark ink to scribble over the words, apparently to dampen the effusive, perhaps amorous, language.

Scientists in France devised a new method to uncover the original writing, separating out the chemical composition of different inks used on historical documents. They tested their method by analyzing the private letters between the French queen and the Swedish count, which are housed in the French national archives.

That allowed them to read the original words and even identify the person who scratched them out — Fersen himself.

“It’s always exciting when you discover that you can know more about the past than you thought you could,” said historian Rebecca L. Spang, who studies the French Revolution at Indiana University, and was not involved in the study.

The letters were exchanged between June 1791 and August 1792 — a period when the French royal family was kept under close surveillance in Paris, after having attempted to flee the country. Soon the French monarchy would be abolished, and the next year both Marie Antoinette and her husband, Louis XVI, would be beheaded.

“In this time, people used a lot of flowery language — but here, it’s really strong, really intimate language. We know with this text, there is love relationship,” said Anne Michelin, a material analyst at the Sorbonne’s Research Center for Conservation and co-author of the research published Friday in the journal Science Advances.

The wide-ranging letters, penned on thick cotton paper, discuss political events and personal feelings. The redacted phrases, such as “madly” and “beloved,” don’t change the overall meaning, but tone of the relationship between the sender and receiver.

Marie Antoinette and Fersen met in France when they were both 18. They kept in touch until her death.

“In 18th century western Europe, there’s a kind of cult of the letter as a form of writing that gives you access to a person’s character like no other,” said Deidre Lynch, a historian who studies the period’s literary culture at Harvard and was not involved in the study.

“Like a metaphorical state of undress, they’ve let their hair down and show are who they really are,” she said.

But savvy writers were also aware that their letters may be read by multiple audiences. Some correspondents in 18th century Europe famously employed secret codes and so-called “invisible ink” to hide their full meaning from certain eyes.

The letters exchanged between Marie Antoinette and Fersen, who never married, were altered after the fact. Certain portions of text were scribbled out in dark ink. His family kept the correspondence until 1982, when the letters were purchased by the French national archives.

In eight of the 15 letters the researchers analyzed, there were sufficient differences in the chemical composition of the inks — the proportion of iron, copper and other elements — that they could map out each layer separately, and thus recover the original text.

“This is amazing,” said Ronald Schechter, a historian who studies Marie Antoinette’s library at William & Mary and was not involved in the study. He said that the technique could also help historians decipher redacted or censored “phrases and passages in diplomatic correspondence, sensitive political correspondence, and other texts that have eluded historical analysis due to redactions.”

Michelin said the most surprising finding was that her team could also identify the person who censored the letters. It was Fersen, who used the same inks to write and redact some of the letters.

His motivations, however, remain a matter of speculation.

“I bet he was trying to protect her virtue,” said Harvard’s Lynch. “To throw out her letters would be like throwing out a lock of her hair. He wants two incompatible things: He wants to keep the letters, but he also wants to change them.”

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Follow Christina Larson on Twitter: @larsonchristina

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The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Department of Science Education. The AP is solely responsible for all content.