June 14, 2023
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Category: “Dead Skunk in The Middle of The Road”
Issues and events that stink to high heaven
Putin asserts Ukrainian counteroffensive has begun, while drones strike within Russia
Associated Press
Putin asserts Ukrainian counteroffensive has begun, while drones strike within Russia
Jamey Keaten and Joanna Kozlowska – June 9, 2023
KYIV, Ukraine (AP) — Russian President Vladimir Putin asserted Friday that Ukrainian troops have started a long-expected counteroffensive and were suffering “significant” losses. His comments came just hours after a string of drone strikes inside Russian territory.
It was Putin’s latest effort to shape the gut-wrenching narrative of the invasion he ordered more than 15 months ago, sparking widespread international condemnation and reviving Cold War-style tensions.
The conflict entered a complex new phase this week with the rupture of a Dnieper River dam that sent floodwaters gushing through a large swath of the front in southern Ukraine. Tens of thousands of civilians already facing the misery of regular shelling fled for higher ground on both sides of the swollen and sprawling waterway.
Kyiv has played down talk of a counteroffensive, reasoning that the less said about its military moves the better. Speaking after he visited flood zones on Thursday, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said he was in touch with Ukrainian forces “in all the hottest areas” and praised an unspecified ”result” from their efforts.
Putin said Russian forces have the upper hand.
“We can clearly say the offensive has started, as indicated by the Ukrainian army’s use of strategic reserves,” Putin told reporters in Sochi, where he was meeting with heads of other states in the Eurasian Economic Union. “But the Ukrainian troops haven’t achieved their stated tasks in a single area of fighting.”
Kyiv has not specified whether reservists have been mobilized to the front, but its Western allies have poured firepower, defensive systems, and other military assets and advice into Ukraine, raising the stakes for the expected counteroffensive.
“We are seeing that the Ukrainian regime’s troops are suffering significant losses,” Putin said, without providing details. “It’s known that the offensive side suffers losses of 3 to 1 — it’s sort of classic — but in this case, the losses significantly exceed that classic level.”
On Friday, Ukrainian Deputy Defense Minister Hanna Maliar said Russia was on the defensive in the southeastern Zaporizhzhia province, though the epicenter of fighting remained in the east, particularly in the Donetsk region. She described “heavy battles” in Lyman, Bakhmut, Avdiivka and Marinka.
Valerii Shershen, a spokesperson for Ukraine’s armed forces in Zaporizhzhia, told Radio Liberty that they were searching for weaknesses in Russia’s defense, which Moscow was trying to strengthen by deploying mines, constructing fortifications and regrouping.
Earlier, regional authorities in southwest Russia near the Ukrainian border reported the latest flurry of drone strikes. The strikes have exposed the vulnerabilities of Moscow’s air defense systems.
The regional governor of Voronezh, Alexander Gusev, said on the Telegram app that a drone crashed into a high-rise apartment building in the city of the same name, injuring three residents who were hit by shards of glass. Russian state media published photos of windows blown out and damage to the facade.
Gusev said the drone was targeting a nearby airbase but veered off course after its signal was jammed. The city lies some 250 kilometers (155 miles) north of Ukraine’s Luhansk region, most of which is occupied by Russia.
Separately, Gov. Vyacheslav Gladkov of the neighboring Belgorod region, which also borders Ukraine, said air defenses had shot down two unspecified targets overnight. An apartment building and private homes were damaged, he said, without saying by what. He also said a drone fell on the roof of an office building in the city of Belgorod. It failed to detonate but caught fire on impact, causing “insignificant damage,” he wrote.
The leader of a third region of Russia, Kursk Gov. Roman Starovoit, said a drone crashed to the ground outside an oil depot and near water reservoirs in the local capital, causing no casualties or damage.
Ukrainian authorities have generally denied any role in attacks inside Russia. Such drone strikes — there was even one near the Kremlin — along with cross-border raids into southwestern Russia have brought the war home to Russians.
In Ukraine, the governor of the Kherson region, Oleksandr Prokudin, said Friday that water levels had decreased by about 20 centimeters (8 inches) overnight on the western bank of the Dnieper, which was inundated starting Tuesday after the breach of the Nova Kakhovka dam upstream.
Officials on both sides indicated that about 20 people have died in the flooding. The United Nations’ humanitarian coordinator in Ukraine, Denise Brown, visited the flood-hit town of Bilozerka on Friday, U.N. spokesman Stephane Dujarric said.
“Ms. Brown said that although initial estimates indicate that 17,000 people are being impacted in the areas controlled by Ukraine alone, it is important to understand that the crisis has not stopped and continues to evolve rapidly,” Dujarric said.
Kyiv accused Russia of blowing up the dam and its hydropower plant, which Russian forces controlled, while Moscow said Ukraine bombarded it.
The Norwegian earthquake center NORSAR said Friday that a seismological station in neighboring Romania recorded tremors in the vicinity of the dam at 2:54 a.m. Tuesday, around the time Zelenskyy said the breach occurred.
“What we can see from our data is that there was an explosion in the area of the dam as the same time as the dam broke,” NORSAR head of research Volker Oye told The Associated Press.
The Norwegian center is part of a global monitoring system that helps verify compliance with the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty.
Experts predicted the consequences of the dam’s collapse would last for months. Continued fighting in the region was bound to slow recovery efforts.
Viktor Vitovetskyi, a representative of Ukraine’s Emergency Service, said 46 municipalities in the Kherson region have flooded, 14 of them along the Russian-occupied eastern bank of the river.
Even as efforts were underway to rescue civilians and supply them with fresh water and other services, he said Russian shelling over the last day killed two civilians and injured 17 in the region.
Kozlowska reported from London. Jon Gambrell in Kyiv; Hanna Arhirova in Warsaw, Poland; Edit M. Lederer at the United Nations; and David Keyton in Stockholm, Sweden, contributed to this report.
Large body of misinformation is fueling American gun violence
Palm Beach Daily News – Opinion
Large body of misinformation is fueling American gun violence
Tom Gabor and Fred Guttenberg – June 7, 2023
Slogans like “Guns don’t kill, people do” and “The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun” reflect the decades-long campaign by the gun lobby and its allies to convince Americans that owning guns makes them safer. This campaign, based on a large body of misinformation, has made America a far more dangerous place. Our book American Carnage identifies and debunks close to 40 core myths that have led many Americans to mistakenly believe that carrying a gun and keeping one in the home will protect them rather than expose them to an elevated risk of harm.
Much of this misinformation stems from the radicalization of the gun lobby, beginning in the 1970s. Since then, the gun industry and gun rights organizations have made it their priority to convince Americans that an armed citizenry is the most effective way to shield ourselves from violence. This campaign has included stoking the public’s fear of crime, funding dubious scholarship by gun-friendly researchers, and shutting down federal funding of research showing that guns in the home put occupants at an elevated risk.
U.S. eyes Russia in destruction of Ukraine’s Kakhovka dam
Yahoo! News
U.S. eyes Russia in destruction of Ukraine’s Kakhovka dam
Preliminary U.S. intelligence suggests Russia blew a major piece of Ukrainian critical infrastructure.
Michael Weiss and James Rushton – June 6, 2023
The U.S. government “has intelligence that is leaning toward Russia as the culprit” behind the destruction of Ukraine’s Kakhovka dam and hydroelectric power plant in the early hours of June 6, according to a report by NBC News.
The dam across the Dnipro River, one of the country’s major waterways, was all but gone in video and satellite footage that has emerged over the last 18 hours. The Kakhovka Reservoir has been emptying into the river all day, causing catastrophic flooding downstream in the Ukrainian region of Kherson. Water from the reservoir is also used by the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant to cool its reactors. According to the International Atomic Energy Agency, there is at present no immediate nuclear safety risk at the plant.
Widespread flooding
Upward of 40,000 people are now in danger due to floodwaters, according to the Ukrainian government. As many as 70 towns along the Dnipro are at risk, President Volodymyr Zelensky said on Tuesday.
Footage from Kherson showed rooftops floating down the river and other homes half submerged, and flood waters are expected to peak by Wednesday. Tragically, most of the animals at a zoo in the settlement of Nova Kakhovka, which is under Russian occupation, have drowned, according to the zoo’s management.
Even as rescue work continued, noise from Russian artillery could be heard nearby, a grim reminder that a mass ecological disaster is occurring amid the backdrop of war.
Timing of the dam incident
Ukrainian analysts have linked the alleged Russian dam destruction to the much anticipated Ukrainian counteroffensive, which may already be in progress. “In the course of the Kharkiv counteroffensive operation, the Russians destroyed the dam over Oskil reservoir,” Mykola Bielieskov, a research fellow at National Institute for Strategic Studies, a government-funded think tank, told Yahoo News, referring to the Ukrainian military’s recapture of thousands of square miles of terrain in September. “So there is precedent here.”
“Although one reason might be to impede the Ukrainian offensive, the Russians also have established an historical pattern of destroying infrastructure in areas they do not control — such as Kyiv — and areas they must leave behind when retreating, signaling that, if they cannot control it, no one else will be allowed to possess it,” said Dr. Alex Crowther, a retired U.S. Army colonel and strategist. “In short, the Russians did this for spite.”
The Ukrainian government was itself quick to blame Russian occupiers for blowing up the dam, originally built by the Soviets in 1956. Oleksii Danilov, chairman of Ukraine’s National Security Council, attributed the sabotage to Russia’s 205th Motorized Rifle Brigade, suggesting Kyiv was in possession of specific intelligence confirming that claim. In October 2022, a Telegram channel, purportedly belonging to a member of the 205th, outlined plans to mine and undermine the structure, with instructions for local residents in the event of “dam failure.”
Eyewitnesses have also come forward, describing hearing loud bangs at the dam they say indicate the use of large explosives.
‘An outrageous act’
Ukraine’s Western partners wasted little time placing blame on Russian forces.
“The destruction of the Kakhovka dam today puts thousands of civilians at risk and causes severe environmental damage,” NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg tweeted hours after the dam was destroyed. “This is an outrageous act, which demonstrates once again the brutality of Russia’s war in Ukraine.”
Josep Borrell, the high representative of the European Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, described the catastrophe as “a new dimension of Russian atrocities.” Michael Carpenter, the U.S. ambassador to the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe, commented: “The destruction of the Nova Kakhovka dam is an outrageous act of environmental destruction that imperils the lives and livelihoods of hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians, as well as the natural environment.”
How will the West respond?
Previous large-scale Russian attacks on Ukrainian infrastructure have almost always led to significant increases in weapon systems from Western allies.
Most recently, after Russia began its campaign of aerial bombardment of Ukrainian power stations and energy plants in October 2022, the U.S. and other Western nations responded by sending their most advanced air defense systems, such as the Patriot platform, to Kyiv.
The Russian response, meanwhile, started with an unequivocal denial that anything untoward had happened to the Kakhovka dam, then segued into accusations that Ukraine destroyed its own critical infrastructure. Vladimir Putin’s spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, claimed without evidence that Kyiv was behind this act of apparent sabotage and that it would result in “very severe consequences” for local residents and the environment. Meanwhile, Russia’s Investigative Committee — tantamount to the FBI — said it had launched a criminal investigation.
Meanwhile, the Russia-appointed governor of Kherson Oblast, Vladimir Saldo, gave a surreal interview, filmed against the backdrop of Nova Kakhovka, visibly underwater. “Everything is fine in Nova Kakhovka,” he said. “People go about their daily business like any day.”
In destroying Ukraine’s dams, Putin is following in Stalin’s footsteps
The Telegraph
In destroying Ukraine’s dams, Putin is following in Stalin’s footsteps
Francis Dearnley – June 6, 2023
The destruction of the Kakhovka dam in Ukraine, seemingly by Russian forces, is being called the largest man-made disaster in Europe since Chernobyl in 1986, unleashing a flood of water across the war zone and putting more than 80 settlements, and 16,000 people, in danger.
Regrettably, the deliberate demolition of dams in war is far from uncommon; this is not the first time Ukraine has suffered so devastatingly. The decision of Stalin’s secret police to blow up the Zaporizhzhia dam in 1941 – only 150 kilometres away from Kakhovka and now the site of the synonymous nuclear power plant – is believed to have killed somewhere between 20,000 and 100,000 people. It was motivated by the same intention: to stall the enemy advance. Indeed, the timing of Tuesday’s attack on Kakhovka can be no coincidence, impeding the Ukrainian counter-offensive just 24 hours after Kyiv began probing various points across the front.
In 1941, the demolition was apocalyptic. “People were screaming for help. Cows were mooing, pigs were squealing. People were climbing on trees”, one survivor recalled. Early reports suggest there are few human casualties from Tuesday’s attack, but thousands of animals will have perished, and the environmental consequences will be felt for decades.
There are other examples of manmade floods intended to impede an army. Perhaps the most destructive and long-lasting was in 1938, when the Chinese destroyed dykes along the Yellow River as part of their scorched-earth strategy to hamper the Japanese. It worked, but at a terrible cost: somewhere between 30,000-90,000 drowned, with as many as half a million dying from its after-effects, especially famine. The dykes were not repaired until 1947.
Another largely forgotten example took place during the Battle of the Yser in the early months of the First World War. The Belgians resisting the German invasion opened the sluices at Nieuwpoort, creating a one mile-wide floodplain which contributed to Belgium holding onto a corner of the country even when 95 per cent of it had fallen. More importantly, it brought a close to the Race to the Sea, fatally disrupting the German’s Schlieffen Plan and arguably saving the British and French armies from a decisive defeat.
Yet the destruction of dams not only disrupts troop movements. It can play a crucial psychological role, most famously in the Dambusters Raid of May 1943, when the Möhne and Edersee dams were breached by British bombers and the Ruhr valley flooded. Revisionists argue its military impact was negligible, but the morale boost for the Allies was huge, horrifying the Germans as to the damage relatively few British aircraft could wreak.
Russia’s apparent attack on the Kakhovka dam has shocked the people of Ukraine and troubled Europe. Perhaps the biggest psychological consequence will be a reassessment of just how far the Russians are willing to go to achieve victory. Many argued for months that the possibility of Putin triggering a nuclear incident was far-fetched. Not now. Indeed, Russian forces had already recklessly shelled the nuclear plant at Zaporizhzhia; yesterday they risked a major incident if the plant’s cooling system had failed due to flooding.
The EU has accused Russia of “barbaric aggression”, yet the fact is Volodymyr Zelensky warned back in October that the Russians had mined the dam and called for international observers to attend the site. Nothing was done. He must wonder how many more times the West can be shocked by Russia’s strategy before they consider his analysis to be realistic, not fear-mongering, forged from the suffering his country has been forced to endure.
Francis Dearnley is Assistant Comment Editor and one of the presenters of The Telegraph’s daily ‘Ukraine: The Latest’ podcast
Couple charged in ‘torture’ abuse case that left 5-year-old boy with 46 visible injuries
Daytona Beach News – Journal
Couple charged in ‘torture’ abuse case that left 5-year-old boy with 46 visible injuries
Mark Harper, The Daytona Beach News-Journal – June 3, 2023
A 5-year-old boy whose skull was fractured when his mother’s live-in boyfriend struck him with a mop handle, breaking it in half, has been beaten, neglected, and tortured repeatedly, the Volusia Sheriff’s Office revealed on Saturday.
Investigators discovered video surveillance from inside the DeLand-area home revealing the child once had his hands tied behind his back for more than 19 hours. Doctors examining him found, in addition to the skull fracture, 46 visible injuries as well as internal injuries, Volusia Sheriff’s spokesman Andrew Gant said in a news release.
There were three children in the home, including an 8-year-old girl and a 9-year-old boy.
“The torture these kids endured is hard to imagine. The good news is they’re in safe hands now, and their scumbag abusers will have to answer for what they did,” Sheriff Mike Chitwood wrote in a Facebook post Saturday.
More: Woman wanted in child abuse, torture case works for child welfare organization say police
Alleged abuser’s history: Man who severely beat 5-year-old is a convicted felon who has spent time in prison
Unlawful desertion charge: Daytona Beach woman charged after abandoning son near Boardwalk on Mother’s Day
The boyfriend, Shawn M. Stone, 32, has been in custody since May 9. In addition to one count of aggravated child abuse, he was charged on Friday with 23 other abuse-and-neglect-related counts.
Jail records show Stone is facing eight counts of neglect of a child causing great bodily harm; five counts of aggravated child abuse; four counts of neglect of a child; three counts of failing to report suspected child abuse; two counts of false imprisonment of a child under 13; and two counts of tampering with a witness in a life felony proceeding.
He is being held without bond.
Meanwhile, the mother, Taylor B. Schaefer, 28, is facing 25 charges after investigators said she repeatedly witnessed abuse and failed to stop or report it. She has yet to be located by authorities, Gant said.
Schaefer called 911 after the mop handle incident, saying she had a “gut feeling” that Stone was abusing the victim, then checked the video footage and confirmed it.
But investigators who watched hours of video found that she had been present in the house when the 5-year-old was being beaten, Gant said, while the mother also saw the boy visibly injured and limping, but did not provide medical attention.
“On the day that Schaefer did report the abuse, video showed her mopping up the area where the victim was beaten with the mop handle,” Gant said.
The 5-year-old boy had been repeatedly bound for hours at a time. In one instance, his hands were tied behind his back at 6:43 p.m. one night, and left that way until 2:02 p.m. the following afternoon.
The victim had also been tied up and placed in a dog cage, Gant said, adding that a common form of punishment for him was food deprivation.
“Another child in the home was forced to drink boiling water, sprayed with boiling water, and beaten with several household objects,” Gant said. “That child also witnessed the brutal abuse inflicted on the younger victim.”
A third child victim in the house was not receiving proper nutrition or care for a serious medical condition, and also witnessed the constant abuse, Gant said.
Investigators’ video evidence is backed up with text messages and witness interviews, Gant said.
All three children were removed from the home and placed in a “safe environment” on May 9, Gant said.
Chitwood shared a Go-Fund-Me page to help the adults who are now caring for the children.
Glen Hobbs, the organizer of the page, has provided several updates on the children. All three have been released from the hospital, where they began eating regularly.
The 5-year-old will need a wheelchair and walker, and “has a long road to recovery,” Hobbs said. The 8-year-old girl is eating well, while the oldest boy “is in good spirits and looks healthy.”
The Go-Fund-Me had raised more than $8,000 of a $20,000 goal as of late Saturday afternoon.
Top Chinese scientist concedes that coronavirus may have leaked from Wuhan lab
Yahoo! News
Top Chinese scientist concedes that coronavirus may have leaked from Wuhan lab
George Gao told the BBC that the possibility of a lab accident should not be discounted.
Alexander Nazaryan, Senior W. H. Correspondent – June 1, 2023
The debate over the origins of the coronavirus has largely been conducted in the West, despite the fact that the pathogen originated in the Chinese city of Wuhan.
Chinese authorities have officially maintained a vague stance, meant largely to deflect criticism. Meanwhile, scientists who may hold clues to how the pandemic began — likely sometime in late 2019 — appear to have been silenced.
That changed ever so slightly this week, when George Gao, the former head of the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, offered his thoughts on the contentious question to a BBC podcast.
Read more from Yahoo News: The endless — and potentially harmful — debate over COVID’s origins
What did Gao say?
“Don’t rule out anything.”
It may not seem like much, but Gao was clearly acknowledging that the coronavirus could have emerged as a result of a laboratory accident at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
The remarks came in a new BBC podcast, “Fever: The Hunt for Covid’s Origin.”
Initially, most scientists thought the virus originated at a wildlife market in Wuhan. But gradually, opinion has shifted toward the likelihood of human error.
China has strenuously denied that such a “leak” took place, and Gao did not present any evidence to counter those denials. But he also did not make such a denial himself when presented with the chance to do so.
Lab leak proponent and former National Security Council official Jamie Metzl told Yahoo News that he could not recall another Chinese scientist making a similar concession.
“At least on the surface, he has been pretty honest and straightforward from the beginning,” Metzl said of Gao. “My personal sense is that he is trying to maintain scientific credibility while not overly upsetting the Chinese government.”
In fact, Gao may have even been encouraged by Beijing, speculates Richard Ebright, a Rutgers molecular biologist and an outspoken lab leak proponent. “Gao’s statement may have been authorized by China’s government and thus may augur a change in China’s government’s stance on the subject,” Ebright told Yahoo News.
Read more from our partners: WHO, advisors urge China to release all COVID-related data after new research
An investigation by China?
Gao also told the BBC that the Chinese government investigated the Wuhan laboratory, though he gave no details about the investigation.
“The government organized something,” Gao said. “That lab was double-checked by the experts in the field.”
He did not say which agency employed those experts, or what they found, other than that they discovered no “wrongdoing.”
But the revelation that an investigation had been conducted suggests that Chinese authorities took the possibility of a lab leak more seriously than they had previously indicated.
Read more from our partners: Chinese virologist accuses Beijing of hiding details on coronavirus
A persistent controversy
Chinese officials and state media have gone so far as to spread conspiracy theories that the coronavirus originated at Fort Detrick, a bioweapons facility in Maryland.
There is no evidence for that outlandish accusation, but it is telling all the same. In some ways, Beijing has treated the coronavirus with some of the same propaganda and obfuscation that the Soviet Union deployed after the Chernobyl partial meltdown in 1986.
In early 2021, China allowed investigators with the World Health Organization to conduct a carefully managed visit to Wuhan. In a subsequent report, the WHO endorsed the view that the virus originated at the Huanan Seafood Market, where it jumped from an “intermediate” animal species to humans.
China has denied the market origin hypothesis as strenuously as the possibility of a lab leak, doing all it can to stymie investigations.
Read more from our partners: COVID-19 likely originated with lab leak, U.S. Energy Department finds in new report
Here comes the raccoon dog
In March, a group of researchers made a controversial, highly contested claim. Analyzing genetic data from swabs taken at the Huanan Seafood Market, which had been inadvertently uploaded to an international server, they claimed that the virus had originated in a cage containing raccoon dogs.
Critics quickly noted that the mixture of raccoon dog DNA and viral matter did not necessarily mean that the animals had transmitted the coronavirus to humans. The virus could have been deposited in the raccoon dog cage by a sneezing human already sickened with COVID-19 — or by some other inadvertent means.
And, it turned out, the amount of viral DNA in the raccoon dog sample was minuscule to begin with.
Among the critics of the raccoon dog argument was Gao, who like Chinese political leaders maintained that the virus had been brought to the Huanan market by humans, not animals, in what appeared to be an effort to discount both origin hypotheses without offering a credible alternative.
Gao disparaged the raccoon dog findings as “nothing new.”
Read more from our partners: Expert says origins of pandemic could be known in few years
Preparing for future pandemics
The attention devoted to Gao’s comments seems to reflect an enduring fascination with the pandemic’s origins, even as coronavirus concerns recede for most people in the United States and elsewhere.
Some have argued that both the wildlife trade and laboratory safety need reform, in China and elsewhere, regardless of how the virus originated.
“As Professor Gao said, science deals in probabilities and not in certainties. In reality, it may never be possible to know with confidence how the covid-19 virus entered the human population,” said James Wood, head of veterinary medicine at the University of Cambridge. “What is important is that lessons are learned and that live wildlife trade, a well recognised route for zoonotic virus transmission, is reduced or banned and that laboratory safety is properly regulated.”
Read more from our partners: The Chinese wild-animal industry and wet markets must go
Scammers using text messages to drain bank accounts in new ploy
CBS News
Scammers using text messages to drain bank accounts in new ploy
Anna Werner Wernera@cbsnews.com – May 26, 2023
In a stark reminder of the growing threat of financial scams, Deborah Moss, owner of a small catering business, found herself ensnared in a sophisticated bank scam that started with a seemingly harmless text message.
Moss, who had dedicated over a decade to building her business, says she had finally accumulated enough savings to pursue a peaceful life in rural Guerneville, California. But her dreams began to shatter after she received a text message purporting to be from her bank, Chase, inquiring about an unauthorized $35 debit card charge from another state. Initially dismissing it as a minor inconvenience, Moss promptly replied.
Shortly after replying to the text, Moss received a call from someone claiming to be a representative from Chase Bank, with the caller ID displaying the bank’s name. On the other end of the line was an individual identifying herself as “Miss Barbara” from “Chase ATM.” She requested permission from Moss to issue a new debit card to resolve the alleged fraudulent charge.
Moss says Miss Barbara told her she needed to verify Moss’s identity and to do so, instructed Moss to read the numbers from a subsequent text message back to her over the phone.
“And I would just repeat those numbers to her, and she’d say, ‘That’s great. Thank you so much, Ms. Moss,'” said Moss.
Over the next week, Miss Barbara called Moss several times, each time saying there was a problem with delivery of the card and each time asking Moss to verify her identity by reading back the numbers from subsequent text messages.
It wasn’t until Moss visited her nearest bank branch that the devastating truth emerged. A supervisor informed her that her account had been drained, leaving her life savings of nearly $160,000 completely depleted.
“That was all my money. It took me 12 years to get that money, and that was my life savings,” Moss said.
Moss’ ordeal sheds light on the escalating trend of fraud and the alarming financial losses suffered by Americans, with reported losses reaching a staggering $8.8 billion last year, marking a 30% surge from the previous year, according to government data.
The text messages asking Moss to authenticate her account were authentic: they were sent by Chase Bank as part of its two-factor authentication system, designed to enhance customer security. But the scammers deceived Moss into revealing the numbers to them over the phone, enabling them to bypass security measures and transfer large sums of money from Moss’s account. In just one week, they conducted six wire transfers, some as high as nearly $48,000.
Moss filed a police report and submitted a claim to Chase Bank, hoping to recover her stolen funds. However, her hopes were dashed when, after a five-week wait, the bank denied her claim.
Chase Bank appeared to fault Moss, writing her in a letter, “During our review we found you did not take the appropriate steps to protect your account from theft or unauthorized use.” Bank officials said they would not reimburse her account, leaving Moss devastated and feeling betrayed.
“My world fell apart. My whole world fell apart,” Moss said. “You think of your bank as being some place that you put your money so that it’s safe but it’s not safe. It needs to change.”
JPMorgan Chase provided a statement to CBS News in response, stating, “Regrettably, Ms. Moss’s account was compromised as a result of scammers deceiving her and obtaining her personal confidential information.”
Chase Bank told CBS News that bank officials had attempted to contact Moss via phone and email regarding the wire transfers at the time. Moss says she did not receive any of these messages. Chase offered the following tips for consumers to remember: Do not share personal account information such as ATM PINs or passcodes. Keep in mind that the bank typically does not initiate phone calls, but if you want to ensure you are speaking with the bank, call the number on the back of your card. Lastly, avoid clicking on suspicious links in texts or emails.
JPMorgan Chase defended its commitment to combating fraud, saying in a statement: “Each year we invest hundreds of millions of dollars in authentication, risk models, technology and associate, client education to make it harder for scammers to trick customers.”
David Weber, a certified fraud examiner and forensic accounting professor, believes that Chase Bank bears responsibility for, in his opinion, failing Moss and neglecting to implement stronger security measures.
“Anyway you look at it, they failed. They failed her,” Weber said. “The bank could have required her to come in and sign the wire form in person. They left everything for her to be at risk, and now they’re saying they bear no responsibility.”
He also said that the current two-factor authentication systems, including text messages, are insufficient in combating the increasingly sophisticated tactics employed by scammers.
“This is happening hundreds and thousands of times a day in the United States using the exact same methods here. The two-factor authentication is not strong enough to protect this customer,” Weber said.
ADDITIONAL INFORMATION FROM JPMORGAN CHASE:
Threats are changing every day as scams become more sophisticated. As threats evolve, so do our methods to prevent both fraud and scams.We know we cannot thwart these scams alone. It takes an all-hands-on deck approach in partnership with law enforcement, the private sector, and government to help prevent, avoid and prosecute these crimes. Consumers play a critical role too, which is why we continue to educate them about the latest scams so that they can spot and avoid them.
SCAM PREVENTION TIPS:
Protect your personal account information, ATM pins, passwords and one-time passcodes. If someone contacts you and asks for this information, especially if it’s someone claiming to be from your bank, do not share it with them.If you want to be sure you’re talking to a legitimate representative of the company that contacted you, call the number on their official website. If you want to be sure you are talking to a legitimate representative of your bank, call the number at the back of your card or visit a branch. Never click on suspicious links in a text or email or grant anyone remote access to your phone or computer. Do not respond to phone, text or internet requests for money or access to your computer or bank accounts. Banks will never call, text or email asking for you to send money to yourself or anyone else to prevent fraud. To learn more about common scams and ways to protect yourself visit: www.chase.com/security-tips.
NC Governor declares ‘state of emergency’ due to GOP school voucher expansion, tax cuts
The News & Observer
NC Governor declares ‘state of emergency’ due to GOP school voucher expansion, tax cuts
T. Keung Hui – May 22, 2023
Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper declared Monday that “public education in North Carolina is facing a state of emergency” in the face of “extreme legislation” being promoted by Republican state lawmakers.
In a video posted online Monday, Cooper said GOP lawmakers are “starving” public schools and “dropping an atomic bomb on public education” with plans to further cut taxes and increase funding for private school vouchers. He said the public needs to speak out against the changes before they’re adopted in the state budget.
“It’s clear that the Republican legislature is aiming to choke the life out of public education,” Cooper said. “I am declaring this state of emergency because you need to know what’s happening.
“If you care about public schools in North Carolina, it’s time to take immediate action and tell them to stop the damage that will set back our schools for a generation.”
Cooper’s speech comes as Republican legislative leaders are negotiating a state budget deal for the next two years that includes tax cuts and expansion of private school vouchers. The GOP has a legislative supermajority, so it can adopt a spending plan and other legislation without needing Cooper’s support.
The governor will hold public events across the state in the days ahead to call on parents, educators and business leaders to speak against the GOP proposals, the Associated Press reported.
Cooper, who can’t run again for a third consecutive term, has been losing political power. Last week, seven Democrats joined Republicans in passing the Senate budget proposal.
“Meaningless publicity stunts do nothing to improve educational outcomes in our state,” Randy Brechbiel, a spokesman for Senate leader Phil Berger, said in a statement Monday. “The House and Senate will continue working together to put forward budget proposals that address the needs of students and parents.”
‘Our teachers deserve better’
Under the Senate budget, average teacher pay would increase 4.5% over the next two years with the biggest increase going toward beginning educators. The House GOP budget had average 10.2% raises for teachers over the next two years.
Cooper has advocated for 18% raises for teachers over the next two years.
“Our teachers deserve better pay and more respect but the legislature wants to give them neither one,” Cooper said.
The $250 pay raise that the Senate would provide veteran teachers over the next two years “is a slap in the face,” Cooper said. He said the proposed Senate pay raise will not help the state deal with the thousands of teacher vacancies.
‘Cut public schools to the bone’
The Senate GOP budget would also expand the Opportunity Scholarship program so that any family, regardless of its income, would qualify to apply for vouchers to attend a K-12 private school.
Republicans point out that public education spending would grow by several hundred million dollars a year annually in their competing plans. And GOP leaders consider expansion of the private-school vouchers program part of a philosophy to give all children access to education options — whatever the source — to help them succeed.
But an Office of State Budget and Management analysis says the bill could cost traditional public schools $200 million in state funding, rural counties being particularly hard hit.
The Senate budget would also accelerate the tax cuts that Republicans put in previous budgets.
Cooper accused GOP lawmakers of wanting to help millionaires by giving them more tax cuts and making it possible for them to get private school vouchers. Currently, the Opportunity Scholarship program is limited to lower-to-middle-income families.
GOP lawmakers are choosing corporations and millionaires over public schools, the governor charged.
“Public school superintendents are telling me they’ll likely have to cut public schools to the bone — eliminate early college, AP and gifted courses, art, music, sports — if the legislature keeps draining funds to pay for private schools and those massive tax breaks,” Cooper said.
Trump Rolled Back Decades Of Clean Water Protections. The Supreme Court Just Went Even Further.
HuffPost
Trump Rolled Back Decades Of Clean Water Protections. The Supreme Court Just Went Even Further.
Alexander C. Kaufman, Chris D’Angelo – May 26, 2023
More than three decades ago, a Michigan man named John Rapanos tried to fill in three wetlands on his property to make way for a shopping center. State regulators warned him that doing so was illegal without federal Clean Water Act permits. Rapanos argued that you couldn’t navigate a boat from his wetlands to a federal waterway, so the Environmental Protection Agency had no jurisdiction on his land. When Rapanos ignored the EPA’s cease-and-desist letters, the government successfully brought a civil lawsuit against him, which he then vowed to “fight to the death.”
Instead, he made it all the way to the nation’s highest court. In a split decision in 2006, the Supreme Court overturned the judgment against Rapanos, but did not reach a majority ruling on whether wetlands that flowed into federally regulated “waters of the United States” qualified for the same protections.
In 2016, President Barack Obama sought to answer that question with a new EPA rule extending the Clean Water Act of 1972 to include millions of acres of marshes, bogs and lagoons whose water — and any pollution added to it — channel into already federally regulated waterways.
Republicans chided the move as a federal land grab, while environmentalists cheered what they saw as a reasonable interpretation of the decadesold law through the lens of the latest science shows about hydrology and the increasing threat of extreme droughts and toxic algae blooms.
In 2020, President Donald Trump rolled back much of the rule’s protections, slashing the total protected area of wetlands roughly in half. In 2022, President Joe Biden moved to restore the Obama-era rule.
On Thursday, the Supreme Court’s new right-wing supermajority revisited the 2006 decision to strike down federal protections for virtually all the wetlands Trump deregulated — and then some, eliminating even the few safeguards the Republican administration tried to preserve.
An environmental advocate holds up a sign during a rally outside the Supreme Court in October. (Photo by Paul Morigi/Getty Images for Protect our Waters)
The 5-4 decision — written by Justice Samuel Alito, and joined by Justices John Roberts, Clarence Thomas, Neil Gorsuch and Amy Coney Barrett — revoked the Clean Water Act’s authority over at least 59 million acres of wetlands across the U.S., according to an estimate by the environmental group Earthjustice.
“You’re going to see the Clean Water Act significantly scaled back in terms of coverage,” said Duke McCall, a partner who specializes in federal water rules at the law firm Morgan Lewis. “The impacted waters are going to be significantly narrowed.”
The Obama administration included any wetlands linked to existing federal waterways via underground aquifers or streams. The Trump EPA narrowed the scope to only include wetlands with visible surface connections to rivers, lakes and other long-standing “waters of the United States.” But the Republican administration made an exception for wetlands cut off from federal waterways via a berm, bridge or other artificial barrier.
The court granted no such leeway, instead dismantling nearly half a century of established federal jurisdiction over wetlands — a fact that conservative Justice Brett Kavanaugh noted in his dissenting opinion.
At the very least, the ruling takes the U.S. back to the mid-1970s, to the early days of the Clean Water Act, said Emily Hammond, an energy and environmental law professor at George Washington University. But Hammond stressed it could be worse than that, noting that the majority’s opinion repeatedly cites the Supreme Court’s 1870 decision in The Daniel Ball case, which found that waterways are “navigable” only if they are “navigable in fact” and used for interstate or foreign commerce.
“It’s always been understood, I think, by courts and by Congress and by agencies that when Congress used the term ‘waters of the United States’ it meant to go further than that ‘navigable in fact’ standard that Daniel Ball stood for,” Hammond said. “To see the majority now citing that old decision suggests their eye is to shrink the scope of the Clean Water Act down back to where it would have been before we had a Clean Water Act.”
“In some ways, this takes us back that far,” Hammond said, referring to the 1870 case.
Kavanaugh wrote that while the last eight previous administrations dating back to 1977 “maintained dramatically different views of how to regulate the environment, including under the Clean Water Act,” all of them “recognized as a matter of law that the Clean Water Act’s coverage of adjacent wetlands means more than adjoining wetlands and also includes wetlands separated from covered waters by man-made dikes or barriers, natural river berms, beach dunes, or the like.”
Thursday’s ruling, he argued, will have “negative consequences for waters” across the country.
“By narrowing the Act’s coverage of wetlands to only adjoining wetlands, the Court’s new test will leave some long-regulated adjacent wetlands no longer covered by the Clean Water Act, with significant repercussions for water quality and flood control throughout the United States,” Kavanaugh wrote.
Michael and Chantell Sackett of Priest Lake, Idaho, pose for a photo in front of the Supreme Court in Washington on Oct. 14, 2011. The Supreme Court on Thursday, May 25, 2023, made it harder for the federal government to police water pollution in a decision that strips protections from wetlands that are isolated from larger bodies of water. The justices boosted property rights over concerns about clean water in a ruling in favor of an Idaho couple who sought to build a house near Priest Lake in the state’s panhandle.
The ruling is part of what liberal Justice Elena Kagan views as a clear trend by the court to curb the federal government’s legal authority to regulate pollution in an era of dramatic ecological upheaval — when other countries are taking drastic steps to preserve some semblance of nature’s current biodiversity and order. Last year, the Supreme Court drastically limited EPA’s authority to curb power plant emissions under the Clean Air Act.
“The vice in both instances is the same: the Court’s appointment of itself as the national decision-maker on environmental policy,” Kagan wrote. “So I’ll conclude, sadly, by repeating what I wrote last year, with the replacement of only a single word. ‘[T]he Court substitutes its own ideas about policymaking for Congress’s. The Court will not allow the Clean [Water] Act to work as Congress instructed. The Court, rather than Congress, will decide how much regulation is too much.’”
Last year, the Supreme Court took the unusual step of hearing a case on a defunct power plant regulation — the high court typically rejects suits with no active legal bearing — in what was widely seen as an attempt to preemptively stop the Biden administration from reviving a controversial Obama-era rule. The court’s six conservative justices, including Kavanaugh, ruled in favor of permanently sealing off the legal avenue the Obama administration took to justify parts of its Clean Power Plan regulation.
The conservative justices’ apparent partisan agenda is hardly the only perceived conflict of interest sowing mistrust in the nation’s highest court. The Trump-appointed Barrett, whose father spent much of his career working for Royal Dutch Shell, declined to recuse herself from key cases involving the oil giant, even as Justice Samuel Alito stepped aside over his disclosed investments in oil and companies.
The investigative news outlet ProPublica published a series of exposés over the past month revealing that Thomas, who was appointed by President George H. W. Bush, failed to disclose private jet trips and land deals he received from billionaire real-estate developer Harlan Crow. The National Multifamily Housing Council, which has close ties to Crow — the CEO of Crow Holdings Inc. is also the chair of that group, and three of Crow’s companies are dues-paying members — filed an amicus brief on an earlier iteration of this case, as HuffPost’s Paul Blumenthal reported.
Republican lawmakers celebrated Thursday’s decision as a win for family farmers crushed under the boot of regulators seeking to make living off the land ever harder and more complicated.
“In a huge win for farmers, ranchers, small business owners, and families — the Supreme Court has ditched the Obama/Biden WOTUS rule overreach once and for all,” Rep. Sam Graves (R-Mo.) wrote in a statement.
But while “farmers and small business owners have been held up” as the most sympathetic victims of purported government overreach, McCall said “developers are a huge affected group who have been strong opponents” of expanded wetland protections.
Another way that Thursday’s ruling turns the clock back to before the Clean Water Act was passed in 1972 is by effectively restoring a variable patchwork of state water rules, Hammond said.
“The Clean Water Act was designed of course to create some floor among the states so that we wouldn’t have the race to the bottom, polluters moving to states where they could pollute more because the policies were more lenient,” they said. “This decision so dramatically undermines the Clean Water Act that we do in a sense go back to the times of significant disparities among the states in terms of protections for our waters.”
“These kinds of decisions are starting to add up,” Hammond added. “There’s no doubt there will be cumulative impacts and we’ll see shifts as a result.”
CORRECTION: A previous version of this story suggested the facts of the Rapanos case occurred in the 2000s. They occurred in the 1980s.