Troops Rush In
August 13, 2021
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“It’s so hard to forget pain, but it’s even harder to remember sweetness. We have no scar to show for happiness. We learn so little from peace.” — Chuck Palahniuk
Troops Rush In
U.S. troops in Afghanistan kept the Taliban at bay for two decades. Because it was America’s longest war, with an astronomical monetary and human cost, it’s difficult to blame President Biden’s decision to finally bring all the troops home. But seeing the Taliban take back that country in record time is heart-wrenching.
In the 1990s, the Taliban captured Kandahar, Afghanistan’s second-largest city, after claiming the country as an Islamic state. They were forced out when U.S. troops invaded in 2001. On Thursday, Taliban fighters again took back that strategic southern city. Kandahar is the birthplace of their fundamentalist Islamic movement, and the 12th provincial capital out of the country’s 34 that the militants have seized in their week-long campaign.
The initial U.S. projection for when the country’s capital of Kabul might fall under Taliban control was six to twelve months. A recent military analysis said Kabul could be isolated and captured in 30 to 90 days, but that timeline appears to be accelerating. There are also credible reports that the militants are executing Afghan troops who’ve surrendered. Taliban leaders have denied the accusations, but last month CNN obtained a video showing 22 unarmed members of an Afghan Special Forces unit being executed while trying to surrender.
On Tuesday, the State Department announced Biden’s envoy for Afghanistan, Zalmay Khalilzad, would meet with Taliban political leadership this week in Doha, Qatar, where the militant group’s political leadership is based. Negotiations there with the Afghan government have been all but dead since they launched last September, but Khalilzad is making a last-ditch effort to urge the Taliban “to stop their military offensive and to negotiate a political settlement.” Critics say the administration shouldn’t put any faith in a group that it says is actively committing war crimes.
The Taliban now controls two-thirds of the country. The rapidly deteriorating security situation prompted a decision to send 3,000 troops back in to help evacuate personnel from the U.S. Embassy in Kabul. The Pentagon said one Army and two Marine infantry battalions will enter Afghanistan within the next two days to assist at the Kabul airport with the partial evacuation. The embassy has a staff of 4,000, including 1,400 Americans. Great Britain will also send 600 troops into the country to help support British nationals as they leave. (Independent UK, CNN, ABC News)
Putin Him Away
- Russia’s presidential election is in 2024, and Vladimir Putin has every intention of being “elected” to a fifth term. That seems reason enough for why authorities slapped a new criminal charge this week against imprisoned opposition leader, Aleksei Navalny, that could keep him behind bars another three years. Navalny was poisoned with a nerve agent last year in Siberia; he was sent to Germany for emergency medical treatment and recovered.
- Upon his return to Moscow in January, he was jailed for violating parole; his prison term expires in late 2023. Now, he’s charged with breaking the law by creating an organization — his Anti-Corruption Foundation — that allegedly encouraged citizens “to commit illegal acts,” like attending unauthorized protests. The foundation produced investigations of the misdeeds and secrets of Russia’s elite. One uncovered a hidden estate on the Black Sea that was said to be a presidential palace; the report got millions of views on YouTube.
- Former President Trump curried Putin’s favor. President Biden vowed to push back against the autocrat’s violations of international norms, which only prompted Putin to double down on efforts to stamp out dissent. In June, a Russian court designated Navalny’s political movement an extremist network. The ruling allows the opposition leader’s organizers, donors, and even social media supporters to be prosecuted and imprisoned. (NYT, BBC)
Saline Towards A Scandal
- A Red Cross nurse working at a vaccination site in northern Germany is suspected of giving thousands of elderly people shots of saline instead of a COVID-19 vaccine last spring. After a police investigation, a call was put out to some 8,600 residents in Friesland, a rural district near the North Sea coast, to come in for another shot. Saline itself is not dangerous, but not having received a real coronavirus vaccine left all those unsuspecting people at high risk of catching the potentially fatal viral disease.
- Investigators said the motive of the unnamed nurse was not clear, but she had aired skeptical views about vaccines in social media posts. A similar scandal unfolded in India last month. Thousands who paid to receive the COVID-19 vaccine at a “vaccination camp” instead were given shots of saline solution. Authorities arrested 14 individuals, alleging they gave around 4,000 people fake or expired vaccines and collected thousands of dollars in the process. (NPR)
Additional World News
- Sexual violence against women and girls in Ethiopia’s Tigray region amount to war crimes, Amnesty says (CNN)
- Belarus denies entry to US ambassador, cuts US Embassy staff (AP)
- New Zealand, a Pandemic Success Story, Unveils Reopening Strategy (NYT, $)
- Italy may have seen Europe’s hottest day ever (NBC)
- Australian capital Canberra goes into snap lockdown (BBC)
- At least 13 dead and dozens trapped after landslide hits highway in northern India (CNN)
- 8 missing after helicopter carrying tourists crashes in Russia (The Hill)
Amy-ing For Vaccines
- Last May, Indiana University, with about 100,000 students, faculty, and staff on several campuses, became one of the most prominent public universities in a Republican-led state to adopt a vaccine mandate requiring that everyone be vaccinated against COVID-19 before returning to campus in the fall.
- The next month, eight students filed a lawsuit challenging the school’s mandate, arguing it violated their constitutional rights and state law. In July, an Indiana federal district judge rejected the student’s arguments and upheld the university’s decision that everyone on campus must be vaccinated. The students appealed the ruling to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit; the panel unanimously upheld the lower court’s ruling.
- The case then went to Justice Amy Coney Barrett at the nation’s highest court. Barrett received the request because she is the Supreme Court justice tasked with emergency petitions from that region of the country. Barrett issued her ruling Thursday, rejecting the students’ appeal, without giving a reason or referring the matter to the other justices. (WaPo)
QAnon Tragedy
- Matthew Taylor Coleman is a 40-year-old surfing instructor from Santa Barbara, California. He believes wholeheartedly in QAnon, the viral pro-Trump conspiracy theory movement whose followers have been duped into accepting — among other outrageous claims — the dangerous lie that a cabal of Democrats, celebrities, and billionaires engage in pedophilia and sex trafficking, and worship Satan. Over the weekend Coleman abducted his 2-year-old son and 10-month-old daughter, drove them to Mexico, and shot them to death with a spearfishing gun.
- According to a nine-page FBI criminal affidavit, filed in an L.A. federal court Wednesday, Coleman explained he’d been “enlightened by QAnon and Illuminati conspiracy theories” and that he “believed his children were going to grow into monsters so he had to kill them.” Coleman said “he was receiving visions and signs revealing that his wife, AC, possessed serpent DNA and had passed it on to his children.” He said he knew what he did was wrong, but “it was the only course of action to save the world.”
- Coleman’s statement about “serpent DNA” could be a reference to the “lizard people” conspiracy theory, popularized by the prominent British conspiracist David Icke, which falsely asserts that many powerful people are actually reptilian aliens that look like humans. The FBI has long warned of QAnon’s potential to inspire violence. In a June bulletin to members of Congress, the agency noted the fact that the conspiracy theories’ many predictions had not come true could create a feeling of “obligation” among adherents to take matters into their own hands. (NYT, NBC News, Reuters)
Additional USA News
- Biden administration tries to mobilize international diplomatic effort to halt Taliban (WaPo, $)
- Redistricting sprint begins with major census data drop (Politico)
- US ‘deeply troubled’ by controversial Poland media bill (Guardian)
- FDA expected to authorize 3rd COVID vaccine dose for immunocompromised (Ars Technica)
- Texas governor files legal challenge to end Dallas County mask mandate (CBS)
- Chicago remembers a fallen officer: ‘A small part of every one of us died when we lost Ella’ (CNN)
- Wildfires continue to swell amid West’s insufferable heat, forcing hundreds to evacuate in Montana (CNN)
Password, Please
Ron Watkins is a 30-something conspiracy theorist, QAnon enthusiast, and former 8chan site administrator. Last week, he released photocopies of an installation manual for Dominion voting machines. The pages gave basic instructions for configuring BIOS passwords — necessary to change some system settings — and iDRAC, a standard network remote control tool that the manual explicitly requires the administrator to disable. Then he released a video purporting to be from a “whistleblower” exposing Dominion’s “most egregious lie” — that the company can remotely administer the machines. He also released several screenshots to Election Management Systems (EMS) hardware his “whistleblower” had access to.
Watkins’ screenshots would be immediately familiar to anyone who’s ever administered enterprise-grade hardware. All this leaked media really exposes is a generic set of server hardware, with explicit instructions to keep it off the Internet and lock down its remote management functions. It would seem that Watkins’ grainy video, blurry screenshots, and hastily photocopied manual pages are an attempt to convince less tech savvy viewers that Dominion specifically designed their voting machines to be perpetually connected to the internet and remotely managed by the company. And what Watkins did, did in fact end up causing problems for one of his fellow QAnon travelers: County Clerk Tina Peters of Mesa County, Colorado, whose office manages the machines in question.
Watkins also released a spreadsheet photo of BIOS passwords for a small collection of computers, including EMS server and client systems. It was likely intended to scare his audience into either believing that anyone at all could access the EMS systems, or that Dominion itself could. But the passwords he exposed are managed at the state level, and when the State of Colorado learned about the leaked photo, it identified the passwords as belonging to the systems managed by Mesa County. Colorado’s secretary of state ordered Peters to turn over equipment, surveillance videos, and documents showing how and to whom the BIOS passwords were leaked. Instead, Peters flew to South Dakota, where she addressed a so-called “Cyber Symposium” hosted by the election conspiracy theorist and MyPillow CEO, Mike Lindell.
Right now, there’s no direct evidence linking Peters to the passwords leak, but it doesn’t look good that during the January 6 insurrection, she blasted Twitter with a series of now-deleted tweets claiming the 2020 presidential election was fraudulent and that she herself, as a county election administrator, had special inside knowledge about how to falsify and election. (Ars Technica)
Additional Reads
- NASA thinks it knows why that Mars rover rock sample went missing (CNET)
- Indian rocket fails to launch earth observation satellite (Reuters)
- This Device Helps Paralyzed People Breathe—and Sing (Wired)
- Mount Etna is 100 feet taller than it was 6 months ago (LiveScience)
- Climate change will transform cooling effects of volcanic eruptions, study suggests (Phys.org)
- An Asteroid Called Bennu Has A Chance Of Hitting Earth In The Next 300 Years (NPR)