What Happened: June 11, 2021

The Big Story

Joe Biden is in England for the annual G7 summit, a mere warm-up for his June 16 confrontation with Vladimir Putin in Geneva. There’s much for the two of them to discuss: the Iran deal, human rights, possible Russian state participation in repeated ransomware attacks against U.S. infrastructure, etc. But what may be the most urgent of the world’s international crises is also one of its most ignored. Yesterday, the United Nations released a report showing that 350,000 people in the Ethiopian region of Tigray, which has been under assault from both the Ethiopian and Eritrean militaries since last November, are already living under famine conditions, with millions more at risk. Control of the region is split between Ethiopia, Eritrea, and Tigrayan rebels; food aid is frequently stolen, sexual violence is rife, and hundreds of thousands are completely trapped by the fighting, cut off from any form of humanitarian assistance. The geopolitics of the conflict are also notable: Ethiopia is Africa’s second most-populous country and a close ally of both the United States and China. The landlocked country depends on a Chinese-built railway that connects to a Chinese-operated port in Djibouti, a country where Beijing is economically and politically dominant, and which has the odd distinction of being home to both a U.S. and a Chinese military base. This is a full-blown catastrophe in a region of interest for two global powers who are taking totally opposite approaches to the conflict, with China’s foreign minister assuring his Ethiopian counterpart that China supports Ethiopia’s campaign in Tigray earlier this week, not long after the United States moved to sanction regime officials involved in alleged atrocities. The human-made famine is also the work of Eritrea’s self-isolating and highly militarized regime, a government that’s infamously insensitive to any outside concerns or pressure. Read about it here: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-57422168
and https://twitter.com/DemekeHasen/status/1403073839614074886

The Rest

U.S. officials insist that there’s absolutely no connection between the lifting of sanctions on several Iranian energy companies and ongoing negotiations over the future of the 2015 nuclear deal―talks that have advanced considerably but whose outcome might be made a lot more uncertain if they drag beyond Iran’s June 18 presidential election, which an anti-American hard-liner is expected to win. Read more: https://www.wsj.com/articles/biden-administration-lifts-sanctions-on-more-than-dozen-former-iranian-officials-energy-firms-11623347091 

New York’s Democratic mayoral hopefuls met for their second-to-last televised debate before the June 23 primary, and the last before early voting begins next week. The race is in considerable flux: Maya Wiley, an activist and former lawyer for Mayor Bill de Blasio, jumped to second in the polls on the strength of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s endorsement and the implosion of the rest of the race’s progressive candidates; Andrew Yang and Kathryn Garcia are still within striking distance of leader Eric Adams, thanks in part to the city’s new ranked-choice voting system. The debate was brisk and lively, with opponents pouncing on Adams’s late-breaking residency scandal, in which the Brooklyn Borough president attempted a series of absurd backflips to hide that he might actually live in Fort Lee, New Jersey. Read more: https://gothamist.com/news/third-mayoral-debate-recap-nyc 

More Trump-era loose ends: Early in Donald Trump’s presidency, the Justice Department obtained metadata on the communications of Reps. Adam Schiff and Eric Swalwell, Democratic members of the House Intelligence Committee strongly and credibly suspected of leaking sensitive information to the media about investigations into the president. But the probe raked in information about numerous people other than the two congressmen, with the records of “at least a dozen people tied to the committee seized” in 2017 and 2018, according to the New York Times. Read more: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/10/us/politics/justice-department-leaks-trump-administration.html 

Mazel tov to our professional colleagues at the Qatari state news organization Al Jazeera, which accepted an award from Hamas, a U.S.-designated terrorist group, lauding the outlet’s coverage of the 11-day Gaza-Israel flare-up last month. Read more: https://www.timesofisrael.com/hamas-hands-al-jazeera-award-for-highly-professional-coverage-of-gaza-conflict/ 

It could be grand opening, grand closing for one of the most exciting medical breakthroughs of recent years. Three scientists resigned from an FDA advisory committee over the agency’s approval of a controversial treatment for Alzheimer’s disease earlier this week, which many experts believe actually does nothing to slow the advance of the still-untreatable degenerative brain disease. One of the doctors who quit the FDA told CNN that 10 out of 11 members of the committee said they found no clinical benefit in the drug, with the 11th stating they were unsure. Read more: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/10/health/aduhelm-fda-resign-alzheimers.html?smid=tw-nytimes&smtyp=cur and https://twitter.com/AnaCabrera/status/1403407088693432325

Well, what do you know. It turns out, per an observational study by four researchers linked with New Jersey–based medical centers, that hydroxychloroquine combined with zinc nearly tripled the survival rate among ventilated COVID-19 patients. Google has actively censored information about hydroxychloroquine’s potential effectiveness against the disease, while then-president Donald Trump’s promotion of the drug turned it into one of the more revealing “morality tales” of the COVID-19 era. Read more: https://news.yahoo.com/study-shows-hydroxychloroquine-zinc-treatments-210300816.html, https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/science/articles/coronavirus-google-censorship-danger and https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/science/articles/hydroxychloroquine-morality-tale

Israel just became the first country on earth to ban the sale of animal fur for fashion purposes. A natural question has arisen among Haredi Jews: Are shtreimels next? Read more: https://www.theyeshivaworld.com/news/featured/1981508/are-shtreimels-next-israel-becomes-the-first-country-to-ban-sale-of-fur-to-fashion-industry.html 

Individual tourists will finally be allowed back into Israel next month, as long as they’re vaccinated and get a negative PCR test beforehand. Read more: https://www.jpost.com/breaking-news/individual-tourists-to-be-allowed-into-israel-starting-july-1-670689 

The fast-kickin’, low-scorin’, oft-tied sport of soccer, beloved of hooligans, racists, political extremists, and authoritarians the world over, returns as a thing we have to glance at every once in a while: The monthlong quadrennial European championship, which will be played across over a dozen countries, kicks off today after a yearlong postponement due to the coronavirus pandemic, with a match between Turkey and Italy. Defending champion Portugal is stuck in the Group of Death with Hungary, Germany, and France, the tournament favorite and most recent World Cup winner. 

Last night was the supposedly final episode of “Keeping Up With the Kardashians,” a colossus of 21st-century U.S. popular culture, and a show that had a huge impact on the tastes, cultural consumption, and headspace of millions of people who never watched a single episode. Read more: https://www.theringer.com/tv/2021/6/11/22528998/keeping-up-with-the-kardashians-finale-kris-jenner-kim

The Back Pages

Nothing inspires obsession like a mystery without resolution, and there are few such mysteries with higher stakes in today’s world than the Havana Syndrome. It’s almost impossible to overstate just how big a deal it would be if the Russians were in fact using a heretofore unknown and undetected microwave weapon to roast the brains of U.S. diplomats, spies, and national security officials, with some of these roastings occurring on the ellipse outside the White House, as claimed in a recent report by the New Yorker’s Adam Entous. Thing is, there is no weapon known to be in the possession of Russia or any other country or actor that can induce brain damage without leaving any outer marking. The CIA isn’t entirely convinced that the “syndrome,” if it exists, is the result of any deliberate attack. Meanwhile, given the United States’ fairly granular knowledge of who does what in the Russian military, it’s instructive that no one has identified a brain-ray attack cell or attempted to name the inventor, maker, handlers, or technical support staff for such a device. There’s no proof of such a device even existing at all. Could the Havana Syndrome be a brazen offense against international order or the result of a hysteria gripping the U.S. diplomatic and national security state—a hysteria that may now have spread to the United States’ premiere weekly magazine? It’s all extremely confusing. Give Entous’s story a read, weigh the bafflingly contradictory evidence for yourself, and be confused even more: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/05/31/are-us-officials-under-silent-attack

ProPublica’s exposé on the tax bills of U.S. billionaires was the biggest single news article of this past week. But was it also total nonsense? Substacker Jeremy Arnold convincingly argues that the nonprofit, so-called public-interest newsroom breezily treated unrealized gains in asset value as if it were the exact same thing as income, and then invented something called the “true tax rate,” an entirely new and meaningless metric that no one had been stupid enough to use before, to make it seem as if the Warren Buffetts of the world were getting away with paying almost nothing. The very likely criminal breach of thousands’ of peoples’ privacy that made this “scoop” possible barely paid off as far as news value goes, since ProPublica had to, among other things, conflate tax evasion and tax avoidance—not the same!—to make it seem like something nefarious was going on. And yet: ProPublica’s top-line conclusions feed a populist anti-billionaire moment and will undoubtedly crop up during the next round of debate on tax reform. Whether it’s nonsense or not, and whether it deserves to be or not, and whether its status as such is an indictment of the entire journalistic craft, the ProPublica story is a landmark. Read more: https://savingjournalism.substack.com/p/propublicas-bombshell-bullshit-tax

This week gifted us with one of the great schadenfreude reads of 2021, an often-unflattering profile of the journalist, Twitter creature, and former political operative Yashar Ali in LA Magazine. Hard to get behind Yashar’s role in destroying the career of Alison Roman for no real reason, but it’s undeniably hilarious that he put himself in charge of liquidating a fashion billionaire’s art collection, and you have to at least respect his schmoozing ability, which is world-class:

He’s always attached himself to rich, powerful people and to elected officials and made himself appear indispensable,” recalls a former colleague who worked alongside Ali in Newsom’s San Francisco office. Like many people interviewed for this article, he declined to speak for attribution out of concern that Ali might somehow retaliate. “I don’t exactly fear him, but he can be vengeful and very vindictive.”

How Ali acquired so many powerful supporters is a bit of a mystery. Even his closest allies are a bit fuzzy about how they met. “I don’t remember how we became friends,” says New York Times Washington correspondent Maggie Haberman. [CNN cheif Jeff] Zucker has a hard time recalling, too. “That’s a really good question. How do I know Yashar?” So does CNN anchor Jake Tapper. “I couldn’t tell you how we met, but suddenly he was a presence in my life—a wonderful one,” he says. “It just feels like he’s always been in my life. But I don’t know that I’ve ever met him in person.”

Read more: https://www.lamag.com/mag-features/yashar-ali/

Turns out that if you tweak emerging social justice speech norms even slightly, they can be used as a cudgel by one of the allegedly leading enemies of social justice, namely the cops. Tablet contributor Nicholas Clairmont goes deep on a hideous incident in which an NYPD union has sued a protester for using allegedly racist language against an Asian American police officer. The implications go far beyond this one case:

The idea that people could be punished for saying something that is a direct incitement to violence has been accepted, and legitimately so, in American jurisprudence. However, the idea that you could be punished if you say something that may make society in general a worse place has (thus far) been roundly rejected, no matter how many critical theorists have yowled. The separation between the specific and the general is necessary for maintaining a pluralistic and liberal society in which every verbal dispute isn’t settled in a court of law.

Read it here: https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/politics/language-police