Friday, October 29, 2021

UPDATED

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Origins of Covid-19 may never be known - US spy agencies

US intelligence agencies say they may never be able to identify the origins of Covid-19, as they released a new, more detailed version of their review of whether the coronavirus came from animal-to-human transmission or leaked from a lab.

File photo. Photo: 123rf.com

The Office of the US Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) said in a declassified report that a natural origin and a lab leak are both plausible hypotheses for how SARS-COV-2 first infected humans. But it said analysts disagree on which is more likely or whether any definitive assessment can be made at all.

The report also dismissed suggestions that the coronavirus originated as a bioweapon, saying proponents of this theory "do not have direct access to the Wuhan Institute of Virology" and have been accused of spreading disinformation.

The report issued on Friday is an update of a 90-day review that President Joe Biden's administration released in August, amid intense political infighting over how much to blame China for the effects of the global pandemic rather than governments that may not have moved quickly enough to protect citizens.

China responded on Friday by criticising the report.

"The US moves of relying on its intelligence apparatus instead of scientists to trace the origins of Covid-19 is a complete political farce," Liu Pengyu, a spokesperson for the Chinese embassy in Washington, said in an emailed statement.

"... It will only undermine science-based origins study and hinder the global effort of finding the source of the virus," the statement said.

Former Republican President Donald Trump - who lost his bid for re-election as the deadly pandemic ravaged the US economy - and many of his supporters referred to Covid-19 as the "China virus."

Some US spy agencies had strongly favored the explanation that the virus originated in nature. But there has been little corroboration and over recent months the virus has spread widely and naturally among wild animals.

The ODNI report said four US spy agencies and a multi-agency body have "low confidence" that Covid-19 originated with an infected animal or a related virus.

But one agency said it had "moderate confidence" that the first human Covid-19 infection most likely was the result of a laboratory accident, probably involving experimentation or animal handling by the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

US spy agencies believe they will not be able to produce a more definitive explanation for the origin of Covid-19 without new information demonstrating that the virus took a specific pathway from animals to humans or that a Wuhan laboratory was handling the virus or a related virus before Covid-19 surfaced.

The report said US agencies and the global scientific community lacked "clinical samples or a complete understanding of epidemiological data from the earliest Covid-19 cases" and said it could revisit this inconclusive finding if more evidence surfaces.

China has faced international criticism for failing to cooperate more fully in investigations of Covid's origins.

The embassy statement also dismissed that criticism.

"We have been supporting science-based efforts on origins tracing, and will continue to stay actively engaged. That said, we firmly oppose attempts to politicise this issue," it said.

- Reuters

US intel doesn’t expect to determine origins of COVID-19

By NOMAAN MERCHANT

FILe - Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines introduces President Joe Biden during a visit to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence in McLean, Va., on July 27, 2021. U.S. intelligence agencies say they likely won't ever be able to conclude whether COVID-19 spread by animal-to-human transmission or leaked from a lab. The Director of National Intelligence issued a paper Friday, Oct. 29, that elaborates on findings released in August of a 90-day review ordered by Biden. (AP Photo/Susan Walsh, File)

WASHINGTON (AP) — Barring an unforeseen breakthrough, intelligence agencies won’t be able to conclude whether COVID-19 spread by animal-to-human transmission or leaked from a lab, officials said Friday in releasing a fuller version of their review into the origins of the pandemic.

The paper issued by the Director of National Intelligence elaborates on findings released in August of a 90-day review ordered by President Joe Biden. That review said that U.S. intelligence agencies were divided on the origins of the virus but that analysts do not believe the virus was developed as a bioweapon and that most agencies believe the virus was not genetically engineered.

China has resisted global pressure to cooperate fully with investigations into the pandemic or provide access to genetic sequences of coronaviruses kept at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which remains a subject of speculation for its research and reported safety problems. Biden launched the review amid growing momentum for the theory — initially broadly dismissed by experts — that the virus leaked from the Wuhan lab. Former President Donald Trump and his supporters long argued that a lab leak was possible as they sought to deflect criticism of his handling of the pandemic.

China remains an exceedingly difficult place for intelligence operations and has fought back against allegations that it mishandled the emergence of the pandemic, which has killed 5 million people worldwide. Senior officials involved in the full report’s drafting said they hoped it would better inform the public about the challenges of determining the virus’s origins.

“We don’t think we’re one or two reports away from being able to understand it,” said one official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss intelligence matters.

The full report notes that the Wuhan Institute of Virology “previously created chimeras, or combinations, of SARS-like coronaviruses, but this information does not provide insight into whether SARS Cov-2 was genetically engineered by the WIV.”

Information that lab researchers sought medical treatment for a respiratory illness in November 2019 “is not diagnostic of the pandemic’s origins,” the report said.

And allegations that China launched the virus as a bioweapon were dismissed because their proponents “do not have direct access to the Wuhan Institute of Virology,” are making scientifically invalid claims or are accused of spreading disinformation, the report said

Four agencies within the intelligence community said with low confidence that the virus was initially transmitted from an animal to a human. A fifth intelligence agency believed with moderate confidence that the first human infection was linked to a lab.

Prior to writing the report, analysts conducted what the report describes as a “Team A/Team B” debate to try to strengthen or weaken each hypothesis.

The report identifies types of data that investigators still want China to provide access to, including records and tissue samples from several markets in Wuhan, including the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market, Qiyimen Live Animal Market, Dijiao Outdoor Pet Market and others. Scientists originally believed the virus emerged from animals sold at the Huanan market, which has since been ruled out by some as the origin site.

Confirming with 100% certainty the origin of a virus is often not fast, easy or always even possible.

In the case of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome, or SARS — a disease caused by a beta coronavirus, like the current coronavirus — researchers first identified the virus in February 2003. Later that year, scientists discovered the likely intermediary hosts: Himalayan palm civets found at live-animal markets in Guangdong, China. But it wasn’t until 2017 that researchers traced the likely original source of the virus to bat caves in China’s Yunnan province.

___

Associated Press writer Christina Larson in Washington contributed to this report.

Report: Intelligence community divided on whether COVID originated naturally or from

lab leak

Sharon Weinberger and Zach Dorfman

Fri, October 29, 2021,

An unclassified version of an intelligence community assessment on the origins of COVID-19 released Friday afternoon shows that various agencies still don’t agree on whether the pandemic began from a laboratory incident in Wuhan, China, or was caused by a natural crossover from animals to humans.

In the spring, President Biden ordered the intelligence community to conduct a 90-day review looking at the pandemic’s origins in China, amid growing debate and questions on the issue. The virus has now killed some 5 million people around the world, and infected almost a quarter of a billion, while disrupting global economies.

The Wuhan Institute of Virology in Wuhan, China. (Hector Retamal/AFP via Getty Images)

“After examining all available intelligence reporting and other information, though, the IC remains divided on the most likely origin of COVID-19,” states the report, released by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. “All agencies assess that two hypotheses are plausible: natural exposure to an infected animal and a laboratory-associated incident.”

The report, however, appears to discount the idea that the virus was engineered in a laboratory as a weapon. “Most IC analysts assess with low confidence that SARS-CoV-2 was not genetically engineered,” the report states.

The intelligence community also appears largely skeptical that the virus, even if it did escape from a lab, was the result of what is known as “gain-of-function” research, in which scientists boost a virus’s capabilities in order to study its behavior. Yet even on this point, analysts at the various agencies appear uncertain.

“No IC analysts assess that SARS-CoV-2 was the result of laboratory adaptation, although some analysts do not have enough information to make this determination,” the report states.

In recent months, Dr. Anthony Fauci, Biden’s top scientific adviser on the coronavirus, has faced Republican criticism about the funding provided to the Chinese laboratory in Wuhan from the National Institutes of Health and the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, which he heads. The claim made by Republicans like Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky is that NIH helped enable gain-of-function research that could have started the pandemic. Fauci has argued that the work the lab conducted with those funds did not meet the criteria for gain-of-function research.

While noting the lack of consensus among intelligence experts, the report is also likely to give new life to those who have long argued that a laboratory leak of the coronavirus should be considered as a possibility. That theory, once dismissed by some as fringe, appears to have some strong support among one unidentified part of the intelligence community.

“One IC element assesses with moderate confidence that the first human infection with SARS-CoV-2 most likely was the result of a laboratory-associated incident,” the report reads, “probably involving experimentation, animal handling, or sampling by the Wuhan Institute of Virology.”

Yahoo News first reported in April 2020 that the intelligence community was looking at the possibility that the virus had escaped from a Chinese laboratory.

The U.S. intelligence community analysts employ what’s known as “confidence assessments” to convey to policymakers and others within the national security bureaucracy how assured they are of their conclusions.

“High confidence” judgments are generally taken to be based on high-quality information or intelligence. “Moderate confidence” judgments “mean that the information is credibly sourced and plausible,” but not of high enough quality to warrant a high confidence judgement, according to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. Finally, “low confidence” judgments are based on evidence that is “questionable,” “too fragmented or poorly corroborated,” according to the office.

The carefully couched language of the intelligence community is likely to settle few debates. And those who were hoping to have a more definitive statement on the virus’s origins are likely to be disappointed by the report, particularly since the intelligence community says it “will be unable to provide a more definitive explanation for the origin of COVID-19 unless new information” comes to light.

Declassified US intelligence report on COVID-19's origins says both natural transmission and lab leak theories remain 'plausible'

Kelly McLaughlin,Aylin Woodward

Fri, October 29, 2021,

Testing for COVID-19 — A researcher works in a lab that is developing coronavirus testing at Hackensack Meridian Health Center in Nutley, New Jersey. Kena Betancur/Getty Images

President Biden ordered US intelligence agencies to investigate the origins of COVID-19 in May.
The Director of National Intelligence released a report about the investigation's findings on Friday.
It said the theories that the coronavirus accidentally leaked from a lab or jumped to people from animals both remain "plausible."

A declassified US intelligence report on the coronavirus' origin found that both the natural transmission and lab leak theories remain "plausible."

The report, released by the Director of National Intelligence on Friday, details the findings from an investigation that President Joe Biden ordered in May.

"All agencies assess that two hypotheses are plausible: natural exposure to an infected animal and a laboratory-associated incident," the report said.

Although the report did not favor one theory over the other, it did come to several other important conclusions. First, most of the authors said the coronavirus wasn't genetically engineered, nor developed as a bioweapon. Second, the analysts think Chinese officials were unaware of the virus' spread before the first cluster of COVID-19 cases were reported in Wuhan in December 2019.

Evidence for a lab accident

Security personnel stand guard outside the Wuhan Institute of Virology, February 3, 2021. Hector Retamal/AFP via Getty Images

The report suggested, with moderate confidence, that the first human infection could have been the result of a laboratory-associated incident, probably involving experimentation, animal handling, or virus sampling at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV).

Proponents of the lab-leak theory often focus on that institute, since it's a high-level biosafety lab where scientists studied coronaviruses before the pandemic. Eighteen scientists published a letter in May saying they thought the lab-leak theory remained viable.

The analysts behind the new government report wrote that they consider biosafety conditions at the institute to be "inadequate." That makes the possibility of an accident more likely, especially given that research associated with the institute had involved handling animals that could be coronavirus carriers.

However, Jonna Mazet, an epidemiologist at the University of California, Davis, has worked directly with WIV researchers and previously told Insider an accident there would be "highly unlikely."

Mazet added that she and the WIV staff developed and implemented a "very stringent safety protocol."

Dr. Shi Zhengli wears a hazmat suit while at work in a secure laboratory at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in 2017. — Chinese virologist Dr. Shi Zhengli at work in a secure laboratory at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in 2017. Barcroft Media/Getty Images

The new report suggests that if the virus did emerge from a lab, the leak was accidental. Chinese scientists "probably were unaware in the initial months that such an incident had occurred," the report says.

Virologists at the institute were among the first to start studying the new coronavirus, and publicly shared its genetic code in early January. Such activities, the analysts add, "are a strong indicator that the WIV lacked foreknowledge of the virus."

Proponents of the lab-accident theory also often point to a report found by The Wall Street Journal that revealed three WIV staff members got sick and went to a hospital more than a month before experts identified the first COVID-19 cases in Wuhan. The report said the workers' symptoms were "consistent with both COVID-19 and common seasonal illness."

But the new report says that's insufficient evidence: "Even if confirmed, hospital admission alone would not be diagnostic of COVID-19 infection," it says.

Not a bioweapon

The reason the analysts behind the report don't think the coronavirus was purposefully engineered is that its genetic code has no tell-tale hallmarks of manipulation.

A March 2020 study analyzed the virus' DNA and concluded that it "is not a laboratory construct or a purposefully manipulated virus." And investigators from the World Health Organization found no evidence the WIV stored virus samples prior to the pandemic that, when combined, could have produced the new coronavirus.

The report also concluded that the virus is not a biological weapon, saying that theory is only "supported by scientifically invalid claims" from people who are "suspected of spreading disinformation."

Did the virus jump from bats?

The WHO investigators who traveled to Wuhan could not rule out a lab leak, either. But they concluded that the coronavirus most likely spilled over to people from animals - possibly at wildlife farms in southern China.

china rabbit farm — A farmer checks rabbits at his farm on January 29, 2021 in Chongqing, China. Qu Mingbin/VCG via Getty

The new report, similarly, says that a lab leak is "less likely than an infection occurring through numerous hunters, farmers, merchants, and others who have frequent, natural contact with animals."

That kind of spillover has been the leading theory throughout the pandemic, primarily because 75% of new infectious diseases come to us from animals. Plus, the coronavirus' genetic code is very similar to that of other coronaviruses found in bats.

Still, the WHO team examined 80,000 animals from 31 provinces across China and didn't find a single case of this coronavirus. China shut down the wildlife farms in question in February 2020, though, and researchers weren't given access to samples from them.

China's cooperation is needed

WHO wuhan — Members of the World Health Organization's team investigating the origins of the coronavirus pandemic attend a press conference in Wuhan, China, on February 9, 2021. Kyodo News/Getty

The authors of the new report said they can't determine the coronavirus' origin unless they get more information from China, which would require the country to be more cooperative and transparent than it has been.

Even the WHO investigators weren't given full access to the WIV's files, databases, freezer inventories, records, or safety logs. That led Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, director-general of the WHO, to say he did "not believe that this assessment was extensive enough."

NORTH AMERICA FIRST PEOPLES
Study details environmental impacts of early Chaco residents

Chaco Canyon Environment

In this August 2015 image provided by the University of Cincinnati, geography graduate Jon-Paul McCool, now a faculty member at Valparaiso University, takes soil samples from an excavation site at Chaco Culture National Historical Park in northwestern New Mexico. A team of researchers has published a study detailing the environmental impacts of Chaco's early residents. (Nicholas Dunning/University of Cincinnati via AP)

SUSAN MONTOYA BRYAN
Fri, October 29, 2021

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. (AP) — Researchers at the University of Cincinnati say they have more evidence that Chaco Canyon in northwestern New Mexico was more than just an ancient gathering spot for Indigenous ceremonies and rituals.

The researchers analyzed pollen content and the chemical composition of soils to help document environmental impacts of the early residents who called the area home, which is now a national park and UNESCO World Heritage site.

Their findings, published this week in the journal PLOS ONE, focus on changes resulting from tree harvesting that sustained daily life at Chaco.

The researchers reported a gradual degradation of the surrounding woodlands beginning around 600 B.C., much earlier than previously thought.

While some of the mysteries surrounding Chaco are still debated in academic circles, there’s agreement that the massive stone buildings, ceremonial structures called kivas and other features that dot the landscape offered a religious or ritualistic experience for the ancestors of today’s Native American pueblos. Many of Chaco's structures are aligned with celestial events, such as the summer solstice.

David Lentz, a biology professor and lead author of the study, said many researchers have the idea that Chaco was too arid to sustain day-to-day living and that the infrastructure built over many centuries at Chaco was used only as a periodic ceremonial center and storage facility.

Lentz said that explanation is too simplistic and that his team turned up evidence to support human management of the area's environment to support daily life.

Amid the shift from people hunting and gathering to underatking agriculture, the researchers noted measurable changes — such as juniper trees decimated for building needs, food resources and firewood for cooking.

“This is a very arid area,” he said. “In arid woodlands, the trees are essential for holding the soil in place. When the puebloan inhabitants removed those woodlands, the result was eventually severe erosion and the deterioration of croplands.”

Paul Reed, a preservation archaeologist with Archaeology Southwest, was not involved in the study and said the new research confirms what he has believed for years — that Chaco and some of its surrounding sites were residential and ritual centers. He estimates that Chaco had thousands of full-time residents.

Another Chaco scholar, Gwinn Vivian, came to the same conclusion while studying Chaco’s agricultural capacity decades ago.

Reed said the latest study provides helpful data on the nature and extent of Chaco’s agricultural processes and other uses of the natural environment by the people who lived there.

“It is a strong counterpoint to the mistaken idea that corn and other crops could not be grown in the quantities necessary to sustain a large, residential population in Chaco Canyon,” he said.

Scientists in recent years also have uncovered previously indiscernible sections of roads that connect sites throughout northwestern New Mexico to the heart of Chaco.

Earlier excavations also turned up everything from copper bells to marine shells and the skeletons of scarlet macaws, suggesting the inhabitants were trading with communities to the south either by making long treks or passing goods from village to village.

Many researchers have documented the shift of people moving away from Chaco due to various factors, including a changing climate in the late 11th century.

The study by the University of Cincinnati team noted that the landscape modifications by Chaco residents triggered serious environmental ramifications.

“At the cost of major reduction of tree density in the local woodlands, their activities ultimately contributed to a destabilizing environmental impact prior to their final exodus,” Lentz said.

___

This story has been corrected to show the organization name is Archaeology Southwest, not Southwest Archaeology.

THE RIGHT ACCUSES OTHERS OF THEIR OWN PERVERSIONS
Top QAnon influencer unmasked as a convicted child molester
Brad Reed
October 29, 2021

A person wears a QAnon sweatshirt during a pro- Donald Trump rally on Oct. 3, 2020, in the borough of Staten Island in New York City. - Stephanie Keith/Getty Images North America/TNS

The QAnon conspiracy theory claims that the Democratic Party is run by a cabal of Satanist pedophiles who also harvest children for their adrenochrome.

Now, it turns out that a major online purveyor of this theory is himself a convicted child molester.

Vice News reports that QAnon promoter David Todeschini, who goes by the name "David Trent" on the internet, spent five years in prison two decades ago after he was found guilty of coercing an eight-year-old boy into sexual activity.

In an interview with Vice, Todeschini confirmed that he was the man behind QAnon influencer David Trent, and he threatened to sue Right Wing Watch, which originally ran the story about his past conviction for pedophilia.

Vice asked Todeschini what facts Right Wing Watch got wrong about him, however, and he refused to elaborate.

That said, he also claimed to be innocent of molesting an 8-year-old and told Vice that the "deep state" forced him to confess to a crime he didn't commit.

"I am an enemy of the deep state," he claimed. "And I did what General Flynn did, he pled guilty to a crime that he didn't commit."

This doesn't change the fact that Todeschini is listed on New York's sex offender registry as someone who is "high risk of repeat offense and a threat to public safety exists."

CRIMINAL CAPITALI$M; THE GRIFTER
Trump’s $300 Million SPAC Deal May Have Skirted Securities Laws

The former president began discussing a deal with a ‘blank check’ company early this year. Investors weren’t told.

Former President Donald Trump began discussing a deal with special purpose acquisition companies shortly after leaving the White House.

Credit...Erin Schaff/The New York Times

LONG READ

By Matthew Goldstein, Lauren Hirsch and David Enrich
Oct. 29, 2021

Just days after Donald J. Trump left the White House, two former contestants on his reality show, “The Apprentice,” approached him with a pitch. Wes Moss and Andy Litinsky wanted to create a conservative media giant.

Mr. Trump was taken with the idea. But he had to figure out how to pay for it.

This month, the former president found a way. He agreed to merge his social media venture with what’s known as a special purpose acquisition company, or SPAC. The result is that Mr. Trump — largely shut out of the mainstream financial industry because of his history of bankruptcies and loan defaults — secured nearly $300 million in funding for his new business.

To get his deal done, Mr. Trump ventured into an unregulated and sometimes shadowy corner of Wall Street, working with an unlikely cast of characters: the former “Apprentice” contestants, a small Chinese investment firm and a little-known Miami banker named Patrick Orlando.

Mr. Orlando had been discussing a deal with Mr. Trump since at least March, according to people familiar with the talks and a confidential investor presentation reviewed by The New York Times. That was well before his SPAC, Digital World Acquisition, made its debut on the Nasdaq stock exchange last month. In doing so, Mr. Orlando’s SPAC may have skirted securities laws and stock exchange rules, lawyers said.

SPACs sell their shares to investors through an initial public offering and then find a private company with which to merge. Because SPACs are empty vessels, stock exchanges allow them to list their shares without disclosing much financial information. But that creates opportunities for SPACs to serve as backdoor vehicles for companies to go public without receiving the kind of investor scrutiny they would in a traditional listing. To prevent that, SPACs aren’t supposed to have a merger planned at the time of their I.P.O.

Lawyers and industry officials said that talks between Mr. Orlando and Mr. Trump or their associates consequently could draw scrutiny from the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Another issue is that Digital World’s securities filings repeatedly stated that the company and its executives had not engaged in any “substantive discussions, directly or indirectly,” with a target company — even though Mr. Orlando had been in discussions with Mr. Trump.

Given the politically fraught nature of a deal with Mr. Trump, securities lawyers said that Digital World’s lack of disclosure about those conversations could be considered an omission of “material information.”

“Financial markets are premised on trust,” said Mike Stegemoller, a finance professor at Baylor University who studies SPACs. “If these disclosures are not true, no one wants to participate in markets that aren’t fair.”

Lawyers for Trump Media and Technology Group didn’t respond to requests for comment. A spokeswoman for Mr. Trump referred questions to the company, whose representatives, including Mr. Litinsky and Mr. Moss, did not return requests for comment.

Andy Litinsky and Wes Moss, contestants on “The Apprentice,” pitched the idea of a media company to Mr. Trump earlier this year. Credit...Dimitrios Kambouris/WireImage

In January 2021, Mr. Litinsky, better known as Andy Dean, and Mr. Moss — both appeared in the second season of “The Apprentice,” in 2004, and are now radio hosts — made their pitch to Mr. Trump to “create a conservative media powerhouse that will rival the liberal media and fight back against ‘Big Tech’ companies of Silicon Valley,” according to a description of their plan in a slide presentation reviewed by The Times.

SPACs were hot on Wall Street, having raised tens of billions of dollars from investors over the previous year. Mr. Trump and the former “Apprentice” contestants agreed to set up Trump Media and then find a SPAC to merge with, thus transforming their new business into a publicly traded company and getting access to its money.

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Mr. Orlando was part of a recent crop of SPAC entrepreneurs.

A former derivatives trader at Deutsche Bank and executive at a sugar merchant, he was better known for his role as a spokesman for his family in a grisly murder. In December 2010, his half sister, Sylvie Cachay, was found strangled and drowned in a bathtub in the Soho House club in Manhattan. Tabloids swarmed as her boyfriend, the son of an Oscar-winning songwriter, was accused, and later convicted, of the murder. Mr. Orlando, 38 at the time, spoke with prosecutors and the media on his family’s behalf.

It isn’t clear how Mr. Orlando initially connected with Mr. Trump, but the two Florida men enjoyed a strong personal rapport, according to a person who spent time with them. By the time they started working together in the winter of 2021, Mr. Orlando already had three SPACs trading on U.S. stock exchanges.

One of them, Benessere Capital Acquisition, had gone public on Jan. 7 — the day after Mr. Trump’s supporters rioted at the Capitol — and raised about $100 million. Mr. Orlando created Benessere with the help of a Shanghai-based firm called ARC Capital that specialized in helping Chinese companies list on U.S. stock exchanges. ARC kicked in funding for Benessere

On Feb. 8, Trump Media was incorporated in Delaware.

By March, Mr. Orlando and Mr. Trump were discussing a merger of Trump Media and Benessere, according to people with knowledge of the talks who were not authorized to discuss it publicly. The investor presentation about the planned deal envisioned the combined company, which would offer a social media app, films, events and eventually a variety of technology services, being worth $15 billion and rivaling tech giants like Netflix and the cloud divisions of Amazon and Google.

At some point, Benessere’s attractiveness as a financing vehicle for Mr. Trump’s venture faded, in part because its roughly $100 million war chest was considered inadequate, according to a person briefed on the matter. (Benessere is still looking for a company to buy.)

But Mr. Orlando had another, bigger SPAC that was preparing for liftoff. In May, Digital World announced plans for an I.P.O. Like Benessere, Digital World was created with the help of ARC.

Image

Mr. Orlando leaving a New York court in 2011 after the arraignment of the man who murdered his half sister.Credit...Mary Altaffer/AP

By the summer, people affiliated with Trump Media were signaling in conversations with Wall Street financiers that they were nearing a deal to merge with a SPAC, according to people with knowledge of those conversations.

In early July, Phillip Juhan, a former financial analyst who had also been an executive at a bankrupt fitness company, was introducing himself to people as Trump Media’s chief financial officer. He said the company was in an “exclusive agreement” with a SPAC, according to one of the people.

It isn’t clear if Mr. Juhan was referring to Digital World. (He declined to comment.) If Digital World and Trump Media had a deal in the works at that point, it would have contradicted the SPAC’s public statements and very likely violated regulations.

Soon after Mr. Juhan mentioned Trump Media’s agreement with a SPAC, Digital World said that it hoped to raise nearly $350 million from investors. In August, the SPAC disclosed that it had lined up 11 prominent hedge funds and other big investment firms like D.E. Shaw, JPMorgan Chase’s Highbridge Capital and Saba Capital to serve as “anchor,” or main, investors in the initial offering.

“We have not selected any specific business combination target and we have not, nor has anyone on our behalf, initiated any substantive discussions, directly or indirectly, with any business combination target,” Digital World said in prospectuses filed with the S.E.C. in May, July, August and September. Digital World said it would probably focus on companies in the technology or financial services fields.

Securities lawyers said that any conversations between Mr. Orlando’s and Mr. Trump’s teams anytime before the I.P.O. in September might constitute an indirect discussion of a potential deal and so would have needed to be disclosed.

“The prospectus broadly denies that any talks have taken place,” said Usha Rodrigues, a professor at the University of Georgia Law School and one of the leading academic experts on SPACs. “If they were in fact engaged in discussions at the time of the prospectus, that raises questions regarding a potential securities violation.”

Some bankers said they disagreed with that interpretation. They argued that Mr. Orlando having discussed a deal between Benessere and Trump Media wasn’t the same as him discussing a deal on behalf of Digital World. As a result, they said, Digital World wasn’t obligated to disclose Mr. Orlando’s prior talks.

The S.E.C. has begun paying closer attention to the timing of deal negotiations, and so have investors in SPACs.

This summer, investors filed a lawsuit in federal court against a SPAC and the company it acquired. The plaintiffs argued that it was “substantially likely that the transaction was prearranged or at least preconceived,” given how swiftly the SPAC, Netfin Acquisition, had entered into exclusive talks with the target company, Triterras Fintech. They also pointed to the longstanding relationship between executives at the two companies. The suit is pending.

Mr. Trump initially expected to announce his new social media company in August, according to a person briefed on the timing. But the plans were delayed after Mr. Trump’s son, Donald Trump Jr., voiced reservations about the Digital World deal, according to people familiar with the negotiations.

On Aug. 3, Mr. Orlando wrote to the S.E.C. asking for clearance to accelerate Digital World’s I.P.O. for that month, only to withdraw the request two days later. When the SPAC eventually went public on Sept. 8, raising $293 million, Digital World said it had still not identified a merger target.

Less than three weeks later, on Sept. 27, Mr. Orlando went to Mar-a-Lago, Mr. Trump’s private club in Florida, to sign a “letter of intent” — an initial formal step toward a merger of Digital World and Trump Media, according to a person with knowledge of the event. For a new SPAC, it was an extraordinarily swift turnaround; most SPACs take at least a year to find and merge with a target.

On Oct. 20, Mr. Orlando returned to Mar-a-Lago, where he and Mr. Trump signed the final paperwork under chandeliers in a cavernous golden ballroom, according to an attendee. Donald Trump Jr. and the former “Apprentice” contestants, Mr. Moss and Mr. Litinsky, were among those in attendance.

After the deal was announced last week, Digital World’s shares rocketed higher. This week, they plummeted. At least two of the anchor investors, D.E. Shaw and Saba Capital, sold much of their stock after the Trump deal came to light. Another prominent investor, Iceberg Research, announced that it was betting against the stock.

Even so, Digital World’s shares remain about seven times higher than before the Trump deal. On paper, at least, the company is worth more than $2 billion.

On Tuesday, as he was boarding a plane, Mr. Orlando wouldn’t say much about how the deal came together. “It’s been wild,” he said.

Kenneth P. Vogel, Michael Schwirtz and Shane Goldmacher contributed reporting. Susan C. Beachy contributed research.

Matthew Goldstein covers Wall Street and white collar crime and housing issues. @mattgoldstein26

Lauren Hirsch joined the New York Times from CNBC in 2020, covering business, policy and mergers and acquisitions. Ms. Hirsch studied comparative literature at Cornell University and has an M.B.A. from the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth. @laurenshirsch

David Enrich is the business investigations editor. He is the author of “Dark Towers,” about Deutsche Bank and Donald Trump. @davidenrich • Facebook

MEN RAPE

Study says male students at British universities admit to rapes, sexual ~~aggression~~ ASSAULT

Oct. 29, 2021 (UPI) -- A new study is shining a light on attitudes about rape, sexual harassment and misogyny among male British students after it found that several admitted to such behaviors at more than 100 universities across the country.

The assessment, which was published this week by SAGE Journals, comprised of two different surveys -- one which surveyed about 300 students at about 100 British universities and one that polled roughly 250 students at a university in southeastern Britain.

The 27-page report, believed to be the first of its kind, found that 63 of the students said that they'd committed more than 250 sexual assaults, rapes or other aggressive incidents over the past two years.

For the surveys, the students were asked about their views on a range of sexual scenarios and their perception of women and romantic relationships.

The report, titled "Understanding Sexual Aggression in U.K. Male University Students," links toxic masculinity and sexual violence.

"Results highlighted that one in nine participants (11.4%) self-reported recent sexual aggression," the report states.

"These participants could be statistically differentiated from their non-offending peers on various established indicators of general sexual offending, of which logistic regression analyses highlighted atypical sexual fantasies, general aggression, hostility toward women and rape myth acceptance as being the most reliable predictors."

According to the study, many students who confessed to sexual crimes also admitted to holding misogynistic views, such as having fantasies about rape and sexual torture and believing that intoxicated women are responsible if they are assaulted.

According to the research,it's estimated that about one in five women in universities across developed nations will become targets of sexual violence. It recommends more prevention work on campuses to prevent sexual harm, such as using staffers to work with sexually aggressive students.

"Male sexual aggression is an international public health issue that plagues universities," the report says.

"Whole-university sexual violence campaigns have shown [great] promise -- particularly at reducing rape myth acceptance and increasing awareness of sexual violence among students -- and may also offer promising avenues for reducing rates of university-based sexual aggression."

Study finds one-third of college men would rape a woman if no one found out

by Miranda Nelson on January 13th, 2015

A sign from SlutWalk Minneapolis 2012.ALAN WILFAHRT

A new study has found that one in three college-aged men admit they would rape a woman—as long as you don't call it rape and no one finds out.

That's the finding from a team of researchers from the University of North Dakota, who surveyed 86 male college students about callous sexual attitudes, hypermasculinity, hostility towards women, and how those factors impact how they describe their own sexual behaviours.

According to the paper, "Denying Rape but Endorsing Forceful Intercourse: Exploring Differences Among Responders", 31.7 percent of men surveyed admitted "they might use force to obtain intercourse" as long as "nobody would ever know and there wouldn't be any consequences". However, when specifically asked if they would rape a woman, 13.6 percent answered in the affirmative.

The paper found there are three general groups of men: those who are not sexual coercive, those who will use force to obtain sex but deny their actions constitute rape, and those who freely admit intentions to rape. Those who admitted they would use force showed high levels of callous sexual attitudes ("attitudes that objectify women and expect men to exhibit sexual dominance") but lower levels of hostility towards women than those men who admit having clear intentions to rape. This suggests that many college-aged men see sexual coersion as a normal or perhaps expected part of intercourse. As the researchers states, "The primary motivation in this case could be sexual gratification, accomplishment, and/or perceived compliance with sterotypical masculine gender norms."

The most recent National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey found that nearly one in five U.S. women will be raped in her lifetime.

Follow Miranda Nelson on Twitter and Instagram.

Interview
US feminist Susan Brownmiller on why her groundbreaking book on rape is still relevant

Susan Brownmiller at her home in New York: ‘Why should we be quiet? We need to hear from everyone.’ Photograph: Christopher Lane/The Observer

Against Our Will brought rape out of the shadows in 1975. As the world reels from the #MeToo allegations, Brownmiller talks about pornography, power and 70s radical feminism

Rachel Cooke
@msrachelcooke
Sun 18 Feb 2018

In the more than 40 years since its publication, Susan Brownmiller’s controversial, groundbreaking book about rape, Against Our Will, has never been out of print. It has, though, often been out of people’s minds – until now, that is. Thanks to the allegations against Harvey Weinstein and all that has followed in their wake, Brownmiller’s work is suddenly crisp again, its prescience and enduring relevance noted anew by anyone old enough, or well read enough, to be familiar with it. In a piece for the New Yorker last November, the magazine’s editor, David Remnick, used the adjective “startling” to describe it. Its author, he reminded his readers, got there first when it came to illustrating that sexual coercion is less a matter of lust than of power; and she made it her business to bust the myth that women “cry rape with ease and glee”. If that fallacy still prevails, this only shows how right she was to confront it in the first place.

After the article appeared, Brownmiller, who is now 82, expected a gentle upswing in her emails, perhaps the odd visit from a journalist. But, no. There followed a period of radio silence. “Turns out my details online were wrong, or something,” she says, with a cackle, lighting yet another cigarette. In her luxuriantly carpeted penthouse flat high at the top of a tower in Greenwich Village, New York, she was left alone to watch as #MeToo rolled like a huge boulder through the national conversation. What does she make of it so far? “Oh, I think it is a wonderful rise on the part of women,” she says, unhesitatingly. “People like me thought it [harassment] was all settled, and it was astonishing to find out that it wasn’t. The need to talk out, I find promising. It’s cathartic. It’s also very sad, of course. Sexual harassment was quantified by the law long ago. It’s been hard coming to terms with the fact that a lot of what we accomplished seems somehow just to have been erased.”

She doesn’t worry, as some people do, about the lack of what we might call due process, the fact that in some instances men have been dismissed on a woman’s word, the allegations against them never having been proven, or even fully ventilated. “Why should we be quiet?” she asks. “We need to hear from everyone.” And she dislikes the attitude of her near contemporary, Germaine Greer, who regards #MeToo as so much whining: “She shouldn’t be taking that line, but that’s Germaine: with her, it’s always been, hey, this is about me.”

But she will at least admit to being infuriated by those voluble younger feminists who insist that older women should step aside, that this isn’t their time, and what they might have to say is of no interest to anyone but themselves. “Oh, it is irritating,” she says. “The world is theirs, I know that. But I’m still here, and I have got things to say.” She shakes her head. “Nobody wants to hear from people my age, even on a subject like ageing. When the New York Times talks about ageing, they mean baby boomers, not women like me.”

Brownmiller, tiny and energetic in grey leggings, with hair that she keeps conker brown, remembers writing Against Our Will “very clearly”. For months at a time, she was hunkered down in the New York Public Library, her typewriter safely installed in a room reserved for writers who smoked. “Bob Caro [the journalist best known for his biography of Lyndon B Johnson] used to sit right opposite me. He was finishing The Power Broker, and to this day he still teases me about my socks, because I used to take off my shoes to work.”

The historical material she needed, much of it relating to two world wars, was surprisingly easy to locate, she recalls. “It was all documented in the card files, usually under the word ‘atrocities’. Yes, that was the euphemism: atrocities.” Wasn’t it miserable, spending her days thinking about rape? “No!” she all but shouts. “It was exciting. Thrilling! The joy of discovery overrode any feelings of horror – and, remember, I had years to absorb it all. Later, when I was on the book tour, a reporter came to interview me. She was in a fury. ‘How could you make me feel so uncomfortable?’ she yelled. The photographer who was with her said: ‘Hey, it’s not her fault.’ But I understood. She had read it so fast. It was hard to take in.”

Susan Brownmiller in 1975, the year Against Our Will was published. Photograph: Denver Post/Getty Images

The idea for the book grew out of Brownmiller’s activism, specifically, the consciousness-raising group to which she belonged in the early 70s, the New York Radical Feminists. One evening, one of its newer members, Diane Crothers, arrived bearing a copy of the Berkeley feminist magazine It Ain’t Me Babe, which earlier that year had printed a long account by a young female artist of being raped by two Vietnam veterans while hitchhiking home from her first women’s meeting. The issue Crothers had in her hand brought news of a stunning retaliatory action against the assault of a dancer by some men at a bachelor party, carried out by group called the Contra Costa Anti-Rape Squad #14. On the day of the wedding, this group had stuck flyers on the windscreens of guests’ cars, detailing what had gone on. “Sounds ugly?” asked the writer of these flyers. “Well, it is. It goes on all the time, one way or another. These pigs know the law won’t touch them, they can always insist the woman is a liar or a slut or crazy. [But] we women are learning to see through that nonsense. We hope you learn to, too.”

After everyone had read this story, Crothers announced that rape was an important feminist issue and that it should be explored by the group. Brownmiller, a journalist, wasn’t convinced. Like many people then, she thought rape was a “deviant” crime, one that any alert woman could surely avoid if she tried. But others disagreed. They wanted to talk. One woman, Sarah Pines, quietly began to describe how she had also been raped while hitchhiking. The worst part of her ordeal, she said, had been at the police station. “Aww, who’d want to rape you?” teased one police officer. Another insisted – does this sound familiar? – that she was too calm to be credible. The men involved were eventually given suspended sentences.

It was while listening to Pines, and to those who followed her, that Brownmiller began to see rape in another light, and when the talking was over she proposed that the group hold a conference on the subject, with research papers and panel discussions. “But I was a laggard,” she says, with a laugh. “The others told me: no, we will have a speak-out first, and then a conference.” The speak-out was held in a church, 30 women took part, and their experiences ran the gamut from street harassment to rape. One woman described how she had been raped by her therapist; another how she had been assaulted in her apartment after opening her door to a man who said he was delivering a package; yet another how she was molested by a junior doctor on a date arranged by his aunt and her mother.

Some of the posters carried on the women's march were so naive – 'Women are people too' is hardly a militant slogan

The conference took place in a high school auditorium four months later – Brownmiller attended it on crutches, having sprained her ankle when she kicked a man who had goosed her in the street while she was handing out flyers for it – and by the time it was over she found she was able to look her own vulnerability “squarely in the eye”, something she had hitherto always refused to acknowledge. She realised that something important had been left out of her education: a way of looking at male-female relations, at sex, at strength and at power. She had, in other words, changed her mind about rape, for which reason she was now determined to write a book about it, one that would deploy examples from history, psychoanalysis, criminology, mythology and popular culture in the service of illustrating her conviction that “rape is nothing more or less than a conscious process of intimidation by which all men keep all women in a state of fear”. Was she surprised, as she embarked on this project, that no one had attempted such a thing before? “No, not really. We were uncovering so many new truths then. The early 70s was a great time for us. Women were so brilliant in their analysis.”

Against Our Will finally came out in 1975, five long years after the first of the key texts of women’s liberation: Kate Millett’s Sexual Politics and Shulamith Firestone’s The Dialectic of Sex. Though it would later be attacked by, among others, the black activist Angela Davis for its attitudes to race (in his piece, Remnick writes that Brownmiller’s treatment of the Emmett Till case “reads today as morally oblivious”), its reception was mostly positive and it became a bestseller (much later, with pleasing neatness, it would be included in the New York Public Library’s Books of the Century).

Some of the sisters, however, were not happy. “People in the movement were starting to say: ‘We don’t need stars’,” Brownmiller remembers. “When I announced to my consciousness-raising group that I’d finished writing it, someone said: ‘Why don’t you be the first feminist without ego who doesn’t put your name on the book?’” She clicks her teeth. “She was jealous, of course. Another time, when I was giving a talk on a college campus, a woman raised her hand and asked: ‘Why did you put your name on Against Our Will? All your ideas came from our movement, after all.’” How did she respond? “I said: what page did you write, sister?”

Did she think its publication would change things? (It is widely agreed now that not only did the book shift attitudes to rape, it may have influenced some changes in the law, including making the victim’s sexual history inadmissible.) “Oh, yeah,” she says. “I thought it would change minds all over America. But I also feel that I was part of a movement. Even as I was writing it, rape crisis centres had begun opening, legislators had begun looking at the law around a woman’s past.” In the long term, however, things did not change nearly enough. “I remember being startled when it came out that DNA samples were not being processed properly in some states, and it was pretty horrifying when it became apparent that some colleges were not going to take accusations against, say, their football players seriously on account of what their alumni might think.”

What has struck her most forcefully about the wave of allegations in recent weeks? (As I write, no fewer than 122 high-profile men stand publicly accused of assault or harassment in the US.) “Well, I’ve been astonished that these perpetrators seem to have such weird sex lives, that is very important. They’re perverts, and I think that comes from pornography.” She sighs. “Unfortunately, the pornographers were in the end a lot more successful than Women Against Pornography.” In 1978, she attended the first national feminist anti-pornography conference in the US, held in San Francisco, which was also where she first saw the dungaree-clad Andrea Dworkin in action, addressing a Take Back the Night march in an edgy part of the city (“I immediately dubbed her Rolling Thunder,” she recalls in her 1999 memoir In Our Time). Back in New York, she and other members of WAP ran educational tours of Times Square – then still horribly sleazy – at five dollars a throw, transgressive invasions that would regularly see them thrown out of strip shows, and which, in their first year, attracted some 2,500 “tourists”, among them a pair of Benedictine nuns from Erie, Pennsylvania.

Susan Brownmiller leading a Women Against Pornography tour of Times Square, New York, in 1979. Photograph: Marilynn K. Yee/The New York Times/Redux/New York Times / Redux / eyevine

But she also thinks it is important that the details of the assaults now being described almost every day don’t distract from the real issues at hand, however memorably ghastly. “I don’t think there has been enough reportage yet about women who work, say, in factories and restaurants,” she says. “I would like to see more of that kind of thing. And there are other things going on, too. I didn’t go to the women’s march this year, but I was on the first one, and my sign was about abortion: KEEP IT SAFE AND LEGAL, it said. Because if Roe v Wade goes, that is it for us – and it has never been more under threat since this crazed person got to be president. You know, some of the posters people carried on the march were so naive. I saw one that said: WOMEN ARE PEOPLE TOO.” She allows herself a disdainful snort. “I mean, come on! That’s hardly a militant slogan, is it?”

Brownmiller grew up in Brooklyn, an only child; her father, a dress salesman in the garment district, had come to America from the Polish shtetl where he was born, where he had married her much younger mother, a secretary. “He didn’t want me to go to college,” she says. “He knew he didn’t have the money to support me, and he was really too frightened to be proud of me later on.” She laughs. “I remember when I told him that Simon & Schuster were publishing me, he said: ‘So, they bought it. That doesn’t mean they’re going to publish it.’” What about her mother? “When I started writing for the Village Voice, all she had to say was: ‘Couldn’t they make your name a little larger?’”

She went to college regardless, having bagged herself a scholarship, but dropped out after two years, after which she slowly built a career in journalism for herself; by the time she was in her early 30s she was a reporter for the Village Voice, a freelance writer for various glossy magazines, and a full-time network news writer at ABC-TV, a lone woman in a “defiantly male preserve of clacking typewriters and cranking moviolas”. It was tough – even her friendlier colleagues liked to remind her how lucky she was to be in possession of a “man’s job” – and it was lonely. Betty Friedan had already published The Feminine Mystique (1963), which Brownmiller had gobbled up, recognising aspects of herself on every page. But the revolution had yet to fully get under way. For the time being, it revealed itself only in women’s wardrobes: no more garters and girdles, tights rather than stockings, flatter shoes. Furiously, she “Pucci’d and Gucci’d”, hoping the camouflage would help her fit in, that she could somehow make a go of it as an upwardly mobile female striver.

It was abortion that gave her what she has since called her feminist baptism. In 1968, she and her friend Jan Goodman (four years previously, they had gone to Mississippi together to join the civil rights movement as summer volunteers), went to a decrepit office building on Broadway and East Eleventh Street, where they then took the elevator to Room 412. “They’re talking about women,” Goodman had been telling her, and so it proved. Inside, the New York Radical Women were attempting a little light consciousness-raising; two weeks earlier, this same group had staged their first national protest, unfurling a banner that read WOMEN’S LIBERATION at the Miss America pageant in Atlantic City.

The talk that night moved seamlessly from childbirth to abortion, which was then still illegal. Brownmiller listened, aware it would be her turn soon, and all she could think was: one abortion? These young women were talking about having had one abortion? She had already had three, one in Cuba and two in Puerto Rico. When she did finally come to speak, what she wanted to say first was that she was lucky to be alive – at which point, her eyes filled with tears. She could not, it seemed, find the words to tell the women how badly things had gone the second time around: before she had finally found a clinic in San Juan that could perform a safe, surgical D&C, she had been to Harlem, where a woman had offered to use a wire hanger, and she had fled a Baltimore basement where a nervous doctor waited until midnight before he injected her with a truth drug (to check she was not a police agent) only to then offer her a saline injection, something he must have known could have killed her.

Susan Brownmiller speaking as part of the Abortion Rights Freedom Ride, 2014.

Saying “I’ve had three illegal abortions” out loud inducted her into the power of sisterhood, and after this she became an active member of the liberation movement. She was there for the famous sit-in at the Ladies Home Journal in 1970 (a protest against not only its contents, but the fact that it was edited by a man), a demo that won the women eight pages to make their own in a forthcoming issue; and she knew all its most important figures: Shulamith Firestone, Kate Millett, Robin Morgan, Gloria Steinem.

It is not lost on her that Millett died almost a month to the day before the Weinstein scandal broke, nor that both Millett and Firestone (who died in 2012) struggled with their mental health. Does she fear they are almost forgotten now? “The first obituaries of Kate were very limited,” she says. “Though they got better as the days went on. After Sexual Politics, her most important book was The Loony Bin Trip (1990) [an account of her struggle with manic depression]. You’ve got to read it! It’s so powerful. But I hadn’t seen her for many years. She left New York and went off to set up her Christmas tree farm. We should have stayed in touch, of course. We were great supporters of each other. But she was leading a different kind of life.”

What about Firestone? (The author of The Dialectic of Sex had a history of schizophrenia and was almost destitute at the time of her death, which may have been caused by starvation.) “I remember the last time I saw Shulie. I was working on Against Our Will, and I had gone across the street to this health food bar, and there was this little waif standing there. ‘Shulie?’ I said. ‘Is that you?’ She recognised me. ‘Look what you’ve turned me into,’ she said. ‘Look what I’ve become.’ She blamed feminism for what had happened to her.” Brownmiller knows that it is one of the cruellest ironies that some second-wave feminists – there have been other casualties besides Firestone and Millett – were unable to thrive in the world they had helped to create. But she is grateful not to have been one of them. “I am very sane,” she says, clapping her hands. “That’s the scoop on me.”

What effect did Against Our Will have on her life? “Well, I wasn’t a young woman. I was 40 when it came out. I guess I thought that once I’d finished doing 29 cities in 27 days, that would be it for me. I would move on. But then it was suggested I go on the college lecture circuit. I did that for two years, but it wasn’t how I wanted to live the rest of my life. I find it amazing that Gloria [Steinem] is still on tour. There is nothing more dehumanising than being on the road all the time; that’s why rock stars overdose.” (She and Steinem have an intermittently spiky relationship – Steinem was critical of Brownmiller in a 2015 interview – and she is reluctant to say more about her now: “It just sounds like sour grapes: there is Susan who is nowhere near as famous as Gloria.”)

Was it easy to get work afterwards? “I was the rape person for a while. But yes, in the end, I wrote other books [her latest, published last year, is about the high-rise garden she keeps on her balconies]. I have thought about men who have made a huge contribution to something with a book, and it seems that the world lets them do other things. But when I do, people aren’t so happy about it.”

Down the years, she lived with three different men, but she never married and she never wanted to have children. “It was easier in my day not to have children,” she says. “In the counterculture anything went. There’s so much mom-ism out there now. It’s one of men’s most powerful weapons against women.”

For a while, we talk about Trump (Hillary Clinton, she thinks, was insufficiently feminist in public, while the president was helped on his way by an awful lot of internalised misogyny) and then we get up to take in the view; it was from this window, with its panoramic view downtown, that on 9/11 she saw the second plane hit the towers. She has been renting here since the 70s, having somehow found more favour with the building’s super than the actor Judd Hirsch, who also longed to bag this particular flat – and she hopes to stay on a while yet. In fact, she is looking for a flatmate. Do I know anyone? She adjusts her sweater, more animated now even than when I arrived. The main thing is that they must not mind her smoking.

ARACHNID TRIGGER WARNING
Asian spider takes hold in Georgia, sends humans scurrying

The joro spider, a large spider native to East Asia, is seen in Johns Creek, Ga., on Sunday, Oct. 24, 2021. The spider has spun its thick, golden web on power lines, porches and vegetable patches all over north Georgia this year – a proliferation that has driven some unnerved homeowners indoors and prompted a flood of anxious social media posts.

(AP Photo/Alex Sanz)

ATLANTA (AP) — A large spider native to East Asia has spun its thick, golden web on power lines, porches and vegetable patches all over north Georgia this year — a proliferation that has driven some unnerved homeowners indoors and prompted a flood of anxious social media posts.

In metro Atlanta, Jennifer Turpin — a self-described arachnophobe — stopped blowing leaves in her yard after inadvertently walking into a web created by the Joro spider. Stephen Carter has avoided a walking trail along the Chattahoochee River where he encountered Joro webs every dozen steps.

Farther east in Winterville, Georgia, Will Hudson’s front porch became unusable amid an abundance of Joro webs 10 feet (3 meters) deep. Hudson estimates he’s killed more than 300 of the spiders on his property.

“The webs are a real mess,” said Hudson, an entomologist at the University of Georgia. “Nobody wants to come out of the door in the morning, walk down the steps and get a face full of spider web.”

The Joro — Trichonephila clavata — is part of a group of spiders known as orb weavers for their highly organized, wheel-shaped webs. Common in Japan, China, Korea and Taiwan, Joro females have colorful yellow, blue and red markings on their bodies. They can measure three inches (8 cm) across when their legs are fully extended.

It’s not clear exactly how and when the first Joro spider arrived in the U.S. In Georgia, a researcher identified one about 80 miles (128 km) northeast of Atlanta in 2014. They have also been found in South Carolina, and Hudson is convinced they will spread across the South.

It’s also not clear why they are so abundant this year, though experts agree their numbers have exploded.

“We see natural ebbs and flows in the populations of many different species that may be linked to local conditions, particularly slight changes in rainfall,” said Paula Cushing, an arachnologist at the Denver Museum of Nature & Science.

Cushing and other experts say Joros are not a threat to humans or dogs and cats and won’t bite them unless they are feeling very threatened. Hudson said a researcher collecting them with her bare hands reported the occasional pinch, but said the spiders never broke her skin.

Researchers, however, don’t agree fully on what impact, if any, the spider will have on other species and the environment.

Debbie Gilbert, 67, isn’t waiting to find out. She has adopted a zero-tolerance policy for the spiders around her home in Norcross, Georgia, winding their webs with a stick, bringing them down and stomping them.

“I don’t advocate killing anything. I live in peace with all the spiders around here and everything else,” she said. “But (Joros) just don’t belong here, that’s all.”

Turpin, 50, tried to set a Joro spider web on fire at her East Cobb home, but then got scared it would fall on her and fell into a hole as she quickly backpedaled. She had a neighbor remove it instead.

“I just don’t think I’m going to do yard work anymore,” she said.

Nancy Hinkle, another entomologist at the University of Georgia, said Joros help suppress mosquitoes and biting flies and are one of the few spiders that will catch and eat brown marmorated stink bugs, which are serious pests to many crops.

“This is wonderful. This is exciting. Spiders are our friends,” she said. “They are out there catching all the pests we don’t want around our home.”

Ann Rypstra, who studies spider behavior at Miami University, was more cautious in her assessment of the Jora’s potential impacts, saying more research was needed.

“I’d always err on the side of caution when you have something that establishes itself where it’s not supposed to be,” she said.

Researchers at South Carolina’s Clemson University also were more circumspect, saying in a factsheet published online in August that they “do not yet know if there will be any negative impacts from this non-native species on the local ecology of South Carolina.”

Amateur gardeners and naturalists have raised concerns about the safety of native spiders and bees and other pollinators.

Cushing said Joros are probably big enough to take on large pollinators caught in their webs, but those insects may be an insignificant part of their diet. Rypstra has studied a similar spider species and said their webs are used by other spiders as a source of food, so the Joro might help native spiders. But she said there was also evidence Joros compete with other orb weavers.

(AP Photo/Alex Sanz)

The bottom line: there are many unknowns.

Most of the Joros are expected to die by late November, but they may return in equally large, or even larger, numbers next year, though scientists say even that is hard to predict with any certainty.

Anthony Trendl, a homeowner in Suwanee, Georgia, is enjoying them for now. He has started a website, jorospider.com, to share his enthusiasm about the spiders and foster understanding of them. While they raise concerns and can be creepy, they are also beautiful, he said.

“It’s been a rough go of things,” he said. “I wanted to find some good in this world. To me, nature’s an easy place to find it.”

PLEASE TURN OUT THE LIGHTS WHEN LEAVING
Woman now thought to be Afghanistan’s last Jew flees country
By ILAN BEN ZION and LLAZAR SEMINIyesterday

Tova Moradi, 83, an Afghan Jewish woman who fled Kabul this month with relatives with the assistance of an Israeli aid group, speaks to the Associated Press at a resort which is accommodated Afghan refugees in Golem, 45 kilometres (30 miles) west of the capital Tirana, on Oct. 27, 2021. For years, Zebulon Simentov branded himself as the “last Jew of Afghanistan,” the sole remnant of a centuries-old community. He charged reporters for interviews and held court in Kabul’s only remaining synagogue. He left the country last month for Istanbul after the Taliban seized power.Now it appears he was not the last one. Simentov's distant cousin, Tova Moradi, was born and raised in Kabul and lived there until last week, more than a month after Simentov departed in September. (AP Photo/Franc Zhurda)

JERUSALEM (AP) — For years, Zebulon Simentov branded himself as the “last Jew of Afghanistan,” the sole remnant of a centuries-old community. He charged reporters for interviews and held court in Kabul’s only remaining synagogue. He left the country last month for Istanbul after the Taliban seized power.

Now it appears he was not the last one.

Simentov’s distant cousin, Tova Moradi, was born and raised in Kabul and lived there until last week, more than a month after Simentov departed in September. Fearing for their safety, Moradi, her children and nearly two dozen grandchildren fled the country in recent weeks in an escape orchestrated by an Israeli aid group, activists and prominent Jewish philanthropists.

“I loved my country, loved it very much, but had to leave because my children were in danger,” Moradi told The Associated Press from her modest quarters in the Albanian town of Golem, whose beachside resorts have been converted to makeshift homes for some 2,000 Afghan refugees.

Moradi, 83, was one of 10 children born to a Jewish family in Kabul. At age 16, she ran away from home and married a Muslim man. She never converted to Islam, maintained some Jewish traditions, and it was no secret in her neighborhood that she was Jewish.

“She never denied her Judaism, she just got married in order to save her life as you cannot be safe as a young girl in Afghanistan,” Moradi’s daughter, Khorshid, told the AP from her home in Canada, where she and three of her siblings moved after the Taliban first seized power in Afghanistan in the 1990s.

Despite friction over her decision to marry outside the faith, Moradi said she stayed in touch with some of her family over the years. Her parents and siblings fled Afghanistan in the 1960s and 1980s. Her parents are buried at Jerusalem’s Har Menuhot cemetery, and many of her surviving siblings and their descendants live in Israel.

But until this week, she had not spoken to some of her sisters in over half a century.

“Yesterday, I saw my sisters, nieces and nephews after around 60 years through a video call. We spoke for hours,” Moradi said. “I was really happy, I saw their children and they met mine.”

“They said ‘it’s like she came back from the grave,’” Khorshid said.

During the first period of Taliban rule, from 1996 until the 2001 U.S.-led invasion, Moradi tried to maintain a low profile. But she risked her life by hiding Rabbi Isaak Levi, one of the few remaining Afghan Jews, from the Taliban.

Levi and Simentov lived together for years in the decrepit synagogue in Kabul but famously despised one another and fought often. The Taliban usually left them alone, but intervened during one such dispute, arresting them, beating them and confiscating the synagogue’s ancient Torah scroll, which went missing after the Taliban were driven from power.

“Isaak came to our home during the Taliban and we hid him for a month,” Moradi said, as her grandson assisted her in retelling the story. They said when the Taliban came looking for him they said he was a Muslim. She made preparations to smuggle the rabbi out of the country, but his health degraded and he died in 2005. Simentov said he was happy to be rid of him.

Levi’s remains were flown to Israel for burial, and Moradi has kept his old passport as a memento.

When the Taliban returned to power in August, weeks before the U.S. completed its withdrawal after 20 years of war, Moradi and her family feared for their lives.

The Taliban have pledged to restore peace and security to the country after decades of conflict, but the more radical Islamic State group targets those who do not share its extreme ideology, including the Taliban themselves.

Khorshid said a relative had met an Orthodox Jewish businessman in Toronto, Joseph Friedberg, some years ago. After the fall of Kabul, he ran into Friedberg and sought help.

“He came to me and said ‘they are going to kill my mother,’” Friedberg said. Friedberg said he reached out to IsraAid, an Israeli non-governmental humanitarian organization.

IsraAid CEO Yotam Polizer said the organization, which has provided relief after disasters such as the Japanese tsunami in 2011 and the Ebola outbreak in West Africa, had already successfully extracted the Afghan women’s cycling team and dozens of other Afghans from the country when it got word about Moradi and her family.

He said the two-month-long endeavor to get them out was assisted by Afghan diplomats overseas, Israeli President Isaac Herzog’s office, and Jewish businessmen, including Israeli-Kazakh billionaire Alexander Mashkevich and Israeli-Canadian billionaire Sylvan Adams, who tapped contacts in Israel, Albania, Canada and Tajikistan to help facilitate the family’s escape.

Mashkevich said he “involved all my friends, because it was very difficult.”

The Israeli president’s office declined to comment.

“We are so thankful that they are safe now,” Khorshid said. “For the last two months since the Taliban takeover, I did not sleep at night.”

Now, Moradi and six of her relatives are in Albania, and another 25 relatives made it to Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates earlier this week. They hope to secure passage to Canada to reunite with her children who live there.

But she also expressed hope she could visit Israel, see her siblings and pray at the graves of her parents in Jerusalem. Her family in Israel could not be reached for comment.

“We still need for them to reach their final destination,” Polizer said. “We’re worried that they’ll be stuck in limbo.”

Adams, the Israeli-Canadian businessman, said he has appealed to Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s office and Canada’s immigration minister on behalf of Moradi in an effort to secure visas for the family. But efforts were hampered by September’s Canadian election.

“We are in close contact and trying to put the appropriate amount of urgency in describing their plight,” Adams said.

___

Semini reported from Golem, Albania. Tameem Akhgar, in Islamabad, Pakistan, and in Rahim Faiez in Istanbul, Turkey, contributed to this report.

Chevron, ExxonMobil report surge of combined $13 billion in earnings

For ExxonMobil, third-quarter earnings amounted to $6.8 billion -- compared to a $680 million loss in Q3 in 2020.

File Photo by Roger L. Wollenberg/UPI | License Photo

Oct. 29 (UPI) -- Just days before the start of a key United Nations conference on climate change, oil companies Chevron and ExxonMobil on Friday reported a major surge in earnings during the most recent fiscal quarter.

Chevron reported $6.1 billion in earnings for the third quarter, compared to a substantial loss of $207 million in the same quarter last year.

The company reported an operational cash flow of $8.6 billion and a record free cash flow of $6.7 billion.

"Third-quarter earnings were the highest since first quarter 2013 largely due to improved market conditions, strong operational performance and a lower cost structure," Chevron CEO Mike Wirth said in a statement. "We paid dividends of $2.6 billion, reduced debt by $5.6 billion, and repurchased $625 million of shares during the quarter."

The company's earnings easily beat most analysts' expectations.

The sound earnings from two of the world's largest oil companies came ahead of the G20 Leaders Summit in Italy this weekend and the United Nations Climate Change Conference, or COP26, next week.

For ExxonMobil, third-quarter earnings amounted to $6.8 billion -- compared to a $680 million loss in Q3 in 2020.

"All three of our core businesses generated positive earnings during the quarter, with strong operations and cost control, as well as increased realizations and improved demand for fuels," ExxonMobil CEO Darren Woods said in a statement

ExxonMobil's free cash flow was able to cover dividends and $4 billion of additional debt reduction, it added.

The sound earnings from two of the world's largest oil companies came ahead of the G20 Leaders Summit in Italy this weekend and the United Nations Climate Change Conference, or COP26, next week.

Experts and officials say the U.N. summit is one of the last best chances for world leaders to take coordinated action to get on track to reach environmental goals set out in the Paris Agreement.

ABOUT TIME

US wages jump by the most in records dating back 20 years

By CHRISTOPHER RUGABER

FILE - In this Sept. 22, 2021, file photo, a hiring sign is placed at a booth for Jameson's Irish Pub during a job fair in the West Hollywood section of Los Angeles. California's historic hiring slowed down in September as the state added 47,400 new jobs. California has been averaging more than 100,000 new jobs each month since February. New data released Friday, Oct. 22, 2021, by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics shows California is now tied with Nevada for the highest unemployment rate in the country at 7.5%.

(AP Photo/Marcio Jose Sanchez, File)

WASHINGTON (AP) — Wages jumped in the three months ending in September by the most on records dating back 20 years, a stark illustration of the growing ability of workers to demand higher pay from companies that are desperate to fill a near-record number of available jobs.

Pay increased 1.5% in the third quarter, the Labor Department said Friday. That’s up sharply from 0.9% in the previous quarter. The value of benefits rose 0.9% in the July-September quarter, more than double the preceding three months.

Workers have gained the upper hand in the job market for the first time in at least two decades, and they are commanding higher pay, more benefits, and other perks like flexible work hours. With more jobs available than there are unemployed people, government data shows, businesses have been forced to work harder to attract staff.

Higher inflation is eating away at some of the wage increases, but in recent months overall pay has kept up with rising prices. The 1.5% increase in wages and salaries in the third quarter is ahead of the 1.2% increase in inflation during that period, economists sai

However, compared with a year ago, it’s a closer call. In the year ending in September, wages and salaries soared 4.2%, also a record gain. But the government also reported Friday that prices increased 4.4% in September from year earlier. Excluding the volatile food and energy categories, inflation was 3.6% in the past year.

Jason Furman, a former top economic adviser to President Barack Obama, said Friday that inflation-adjusted wages still trail their pre-pandemic level, given the big price jumps that occurred over the spring and summer for new and used cars, furniture, and airline tickets.

Whether inflation fades in the coming months will determine how much benefit workers get from higher pay.

Many economists expect inflation to slow a bit, while wages are likely to keep rising.

Pay is rising much faster in the recovery from the pandemic recession than in the recovery from the Great Recession of 2008-2009, when wage growth kept slowing until a year after that downturn ended. That’s because of the different nature of the two recessions and the different policy responses.

There has been much more government stimulus during and after the pandemic recession compared with the previous one, including the $2 trillion financial support package signed by former President Donald Trump in March 2020 and the $1.9 trillion in aid approved by President Joe Biden this March. Both packages provided stimulus checks and enhanced unemployment benefits that fueled greater spending.

Lower-paid workers have seen the biggest gains, with pay rising for employees at restaurants, bars and hotels by 8.1% in the third quarter from a year earlier. For retail workers it’s jumped 5.9%.

The healthy increase for disadvantaged workers “is the result of specific policy choices to give workers a better bargaining hand and to ensure the economy recovered faster,” said Mike Konczal, a director at the left-leaning Roosevelt Institute. “The fact that it’s happening is pretty unique.”

The stimulus checks and an extra $300 a week in jobless benefits, which ended in early September, gave those out of work more leverage to demand higher pay, Konczal said. In addition, the Fed’s low-interest rate policies helped spur more spending, raising the demand for workers.

In August, there were 10.4 million jobs available, down from the 11 million in July, which was the most in two decades.

Millions of Americans are responding to rising wages by quitting their jobs for better-paying positions. In August, nearly 3% of American workers quit their jobs, a record high. A higher number of quits also means companies have to raise pay to keep their employees.

Workers who switch jobs are seeing some of the sharpest income gains in decades. According to the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta, in September job-switchers saw their pay jump 5.4% compared with a year earlier. That’s up from just 3.4% in May and the biggest increase in nearly 20 years. For those who stayed in their jobs, pay rose 3.5%.

Esther Cano, 26, is one of those who found a new job that paid more in the July-September quarter. A recent college graduate who isn’t yet sure of her long-term career path, she left a job as a dispatcher at an HVAC firm in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, for a position at the job placement agency Robert Half. She started in July and got a raise of about 10%.

“What I was requesting was lower than what they were willing to pay,” Cano said. “It was a no-brainer on that end, plus the environment, the room for growth, the opportunity.”

Cano has already gotten a promotion to a team leader position, where she helps place temporary employees who work in finance and accounting.

Most economists expect solid wage gains to continue for the coming months. Data from the Indeed job listings website shows that employers are still posting huge numbers of available jobs.

Higher pay can fuel inflation, as companies raise prices to cover their increased costs. But that’s not the only way businesses can respond. Lydia Boussour, an economist at Oxford Economics, notes that corporate profits in the April-June quarter were at their highest level in nearly a decade. That suggests many companies can pay higher salaries without having to lift prices.

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