Mental Health – Page 31 – The Tarbabys Blog

Trump Doubles Down on Hating America: Trump says Caracas is ‘safer’ than most U.S. cities. Here’s what the numbers show

Miami Herald

Trump says Caracas is ‘safer’ than most U.S. cities. Here’s what the numbers show

Antonio Maria Delgado – August 24, 2024

Former President Donald Trump has said on different occasions that Caracas, the Venezuelan capital with a reputation for a sky-high crime rate, has now become a “safe” city because most of its criminals have entered illegally into the United States.

On Thursday night he repeated the claim in an interview with Newsmax. “We’ll go to Caracas, because it will be safer than any place in our country,” he said.

On Aug. 5, he told livestreamer Adin Ross that “If you look at Caracas, it was known for being a very dangerous city and now it’s very safe,” he said. “In fact, the next interview we do, we’ll do it in Caracas, Venezuela, because it’s safer than many of our cities.”

But is Caracas, which just a few years ago was considered one of the most dangerous cities in the Western Hemisphere, safer now than large American cities?

The Nicolas Maduro regime has not broken out numbers for crime in Venezuelan cities for years. But there are organizations that keep track of the figures — and they show the Venezuelan capital is still significantly less safe than most American cities.

Those numbers show that while crime has come down in recent years, a visit to the Venezuelan capital still is not recommended for the fainthearted. According to the Venezuelan Observatory of Violence, a Caracas-based non-profit group widely regarded as the authority on the nation’s homicide rate, Caracas had a rate of 50.8 homicides per 100,000 people.

That’s more than six times the U.S. national average of 7.8 registered in 2020, according to the National Center for Health Statistics, a unit of the U.S Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The national homicide average for Venezuela in 2023 was 26.8, almost four times higher than the rate in the U.S.

According to the group, the Caracas homicide rate rate for 2023 came down a bit from previous years. Part of the reason is that 7.7 million Venezuelans have fled the country in the past few years, and among them are a comparatively small numbers of criminals, according to experts on Venezuelan crime. In 2020, for example, Caracas closed the year with a homicide rate rate of 56.2 per 100,000 people.

Caracas’ 2023 homicide rate is surpassed by only two large U.S. cities: New Orleans, at 58.4, and St. Louis, at 57.2, according to 2022 numbers from the CDC.

Most large American cities have numbers between the mid single digits and the low double digits. In 2022, for example, the city of Miami’s homicide rate was 8.6, while Jacksonville stood at 15.3, according to the CDC numbers.

Despite their high rates, New Orleans and St. Louis could be considered relatively peaceful in comparison with Venezuela’s most violent cities, all located in the mining region of the southern state of Bolivar. These are El Callao, with 424 violent death victims for 100,000 people, Sifontes, with 151, and Roscio, with 134, according to the violence observatory.

Concerns about the lack of security in Venezuela led the U.S. State Department to maintain a level 4 “Do Not Travel” advisory on Venezuela, originally issued on January 2023, warning Americans that they would be at risk in the South American country given its high crime, civil unrest and the risk of becoming victims to kidnappings or ill treatment from local police.

“Violent crimes, such as homicide, armed robbery, kidnapping, and carjacking, are common in Venezuela. Political rallies and demonstrations occur, often with little notice. Anti-Maduro demonstrations have elicited a strong police and security force response, including the use of tear gas, pepper spray, and rubber bullets against participants, and occasionally devolve into looting and vandalism,” the State Department warned in its advisory.

How U.S. cities rate

Here are the homicide rates per 100,000 inhabitants in the 10 largest U.S. cities in 2022, according to the CDC:

▪ Philadelphia, 34.1

▪ Chicago, 18.2

▪ Houston, 13

▪ Dallas, 11

▪ New York, 9.7

▪ San Antonio, 9.4

▪ Phoenix, 8.5

▪ Los Angeles, 7.3

▪ San Diego, 3.4

▪ San Jose, 2.2

The Christian Persecution Narrative Rings Hollow

The New York Times – Opinion

The Christian Persecution Narrative Rings Hollow

By David French, Opinion Columnist – August 25, 2024

Students, seen from behind, bow their heads in prayer in a classroom in Texas in 1962. — Credit…Bettmann/Getty Images

This June, I was invited on a friend’s podcast to answer a question I’ve been asked over and over again in the Trump era. Are Christians really persecuted in the United States of America? Millions of my fellow evangelicals believe we are, or they believe we’re one election away from a crackdown. This sense of dread and despair helps tie conservative Christians, people who center their lives on the church and the institutions of the church, to Donald Trump — the man they believe will fight to keep faith alive.

As I told my friend, the short answer is no, not by any meaningful historical definition of persecution. American Christians enjoy an immense amount of liberty and power.

But that’s not the only answer. American history tells the story of two competing factions that possess very different visions of the role of faith in American public life. Both of them torment each other, and both of them have made constitutional mistakes that have triggered deep cultural conflict.

One of the most valuable and humbling experiences in life is to experience an American community as part of the in-group and as part of the out-group. I spent most of my life living in the cultural and political center of American evangelical Christianity, but in the past nine years I’ve been relentlessly pushed to the periphery. The process has been painful. Even so, I’m grateful for my new perspective.

When you’re inside evangelicalism, Christian media is full of stories of Christians under threat — of universities discriminating against Christian student groups, of a Catholic foster care agency denied city contracts because of its stance on marriage or of churches that faced discriminatory treatment during Covid, when secular gatherings were often privileged over religious worship.

Combine those stories with the personal tales of Christians who faced death threats, intimidation and online harassment for their views, and it’s easy to tell a story of American backsliding — a nation that once respected or even revered Christianity now persecutes Christians. If the left is angry at conservatives for seeking the protection of a man like Trump, then it has only itself to blame.

But when you’re pushed outside evangelicalism, the world starts to look very different. You see conservative Christians attacking the fundamental freedoms of their opponents. Red-state legislatures pass laws restricting the free speech of progressives and L.G.B.T.Q. Americans. Christian school board members attempt to restrict access to books in the name of their own moral norms. Other conservatives want to reverse the Supreme Court’s decision in Obergefell v. Hodges, to bring legal recognition of same-sex marriages to an end.

Combine those stories with personal tales of progressives and other dissenters experiencing threats from and intimidation by conservative Christians, and you begin to see why the Christian persecution narrative rings hollow. And if conservative Christians are angry at progressive Americans for believing they are hateful hypocrites, then they have only themselves to blame.

After living inside and outside conservative evangelicalism, I have a different view. While injustice is real, the Christian persecution narrative is fundamentally false. America isn’t persecuting Christians; it’s living with the fallout of two consequential constitutional mistakes that distort our politics and damage our culture.

First, for most of American history, courts underenforced the establishment clause of the First Amendment. It wasn’t even held clearly applicable to the states until 1947. Americans lived under what my colleague Ross Douthat calls the “soft hegemony of American Protestantism.” It was “soft” in part because America never possessed a national church on par with European establishments, but it was certainly hard enough to mandate Bible readings and prayer in schools and to pass a host of explicitly anti-Catholic Blaine Amendments that were intended to blunt Catholic influence in the United States.

This soft hegemony wasn’t constitutionally or culturally sustainable. Mandating Protestant Scripture readings is ultimately incompatible with a First Amendment that doesn’t permit the state to privilege any particular sect or denomination. Culturally, the process of diversification and secularization makes any specific religious hegemony impossible. There simply aren’t a sufficient number of Americans of any single faith tradition to dominate American life.

In the 1960s the Warren court began dismantling the soft Protestant establishment by blocking school prayer and Scripture reading. A series of cases limited the power of the state to express a religious point of view. But then state and local governments overcorrected. They overenforced the establishment clause and violated the free speech and free exercise clauses by taking aim at private religious expression.

The desire to disentangle church and state led to a search-and-destroy approach to religious expression in public institutions. Public schools and public colleges denied religious organizations equal access to public facilities. States and public colleges denied religious institutions equal access to public funds.

I started my legal career in 1994, when equal access was very much in doubt. I spent the better part of two decades filing lawsuit after lawsuit that made essentially the same claim: State actors must treat religious speech the same as they treat secular speech. The proper interplay between the free exercise clause and the establishment clause ought to mean that private religious speech should neither be favored nor disfavored by the government. The state can’t run the church, and the church can’t run the state.

The Supreme Court has spent much of the past two decades correcting the overcorrection that began in the 1960s and 1970s. In fact, religious liberty proponents haven’t lost a significant Supreme Court case in 14 years. During that time, the court has established (often through supermajorities that include justices from the left and the right) that people of faith enjoy equal access to school facilities, equal access to public funds (including tuition assistance to fund private religious education) and extraordinary independence from nondiscrimination laws that would otherwise interfere with the hiring and firing of ministerial employees.

Conservative and liberal justices have created a different, sustainable equilibrium, but the religious liberty culture war rages on anyway — in part because millions of Americans don’t want to strike a balance. They actually prefer domination to accommodation. Many conservative evangelicals miss the old Protestant establishment, and they want it back. This is part of the impulse behind the recent Ten Commandments law in Louisiana, for example, or the recent effort in Oklahoma to establish a religious charter school, a public school run by the Catholic Church.

Combine these efforts at religious establishment with red-state legislation aimed at progressive and L.G.B.T.Q. Americans, and one could fairly assert that Christians are persecuting their opponents.

But there’s more to it than that. There are secular Americans who do take aim at Christian expression and at Christian institutions. They don’t want separation of church and state so much as they seek regulation of the church by the state, to push the church into conformance with a secular political ideology.

Then both sides tear into each other with an inexcusable level of fury and malice. When I was representing conservative Christian organizations, I could regale Christian audiences with stories of extreme secular intolerance, and I never ran out of material — especially when discussing religious liberty on college campuses.

Then conservative evangelicalism ejected me from its ranks, and I experienced a level of anger and malice that eclipsed anything I experienced from the most vitriolic secular progressives. I started to hear from others who’d experienced the same thing, and my eyes opened. Christians are wrecking lives in the name of righteousness.

Every culture war battle has casualties. Take a 2022 Supreme Court case about a praying high school football coach. He was seeking the right to pray on the field, and he won. The Supreme Court said his personal prayer was constitutionally protected. But that’s not the entire story.

Employees in the coach’s school district endured their own ordeal. I was struck by the opening sentence of an essay I read by a former teacher in the district: “‘That was another death threat,’ our high school secretary said to me after hanging up the phone.” A legal dispute isn’t proof of persecution, but threats most definitely count.

Christians who bemoan cultural hostility to their faith should be humbled by a sad reality. When it comes to inflicting pain on their political adversaries, conservative Christians often give worse than they get.

David French is an Opinion columnist, writing about law, culture, religion and armed conflict. He is a veteran of Operation Iraqi Freedom and a former constitutional litigator. His most recent book is “Divided We Fall: America’s Secession Threat and How to Restore Our Nation.”

A stark social divide: Adults without a college degree more likely to have no close friends, survey finds

NBC News

A stark social divide: Adults without a college degree more likely to have no close friends, survey finds

Aria Bendix – August 25, 2024

People swim at the Astoria Pool on the opening day (Spencer Platt / Getty Images) — For those without a college degree, there may be fewer opportunities to engage in social activities.

The Summary

In a survey, nearly a quarter of U.S. adults without a college degree said they had no close friends.
People without a college degree also reported less participation in social activities like going to parks or restaurants than college-educated adults.
The findings come amid a documented rise in loneliness and social isolation.

Nearly all U.S. adults used to have close friends.

In 1990, the share of the population that said they didn’t was low and roughly the same no matter one’s education level: just 2% for people with college degrees and 3% for those without.

But a recent survey suggests that share has risen overall, particularly among those who did not graduate college — creating a kind of class divide in people’s level of social engagement and connection. Nearly a quarter of U.S. adults with a high school diploma or lower education level said they had no close friends. The number was even higher for Black adults in that group: 35%.

Just 10% of those with a college degree said the same.

The findings come from a survey of around 6,600 adults conducted by the Survey Center on American Life, a nonprofit that researches how people’s lives are shaped by culture, politics and technology.

“Our social fabric seems to have two layers now,” said Daniel Cox, the center’s director and a co-author of a report published this week summarizing the findings. “It has one for college-educated folks that seems to be relatively intact, and then one for those without college degrees, which seems to be in tatters.”

The findings come amid a documented rise in social isolation nationwide. Around 30% of adults say they’ve felt lonely at least once per week over the past year, and 10% say they’re lonely every day, according to a January poll from the American Psychiatric Association.

The U.S. Surgeon General declared loneliness an epidemic last year, citing its links to heart disease, stroke, dementia and premature death. San Mateo County, California, which includes part of Silicon Valley, subsequently declared a public health emergency over high rates of loneliness among residents.

“There’s been considerable decline and atrophy in American social connection,” said Cox, who is also a senior fellow of polling and public opinion at the conservative Washington think tank American Enterprise Institute, adding that although the pandemic helped bring the issue to light, “this decline had gone on for decades before.”

He offered a few ideas that might explain the trend. One is that being alone is less boring now, thanks to video games and streaming services, so people may be less likely to join social groups or spend time with friends or family. Another is that for those without a college degree, there are fewer opportunities to engage in social activities, perhaps because their access to free public spaces is more limited or they lack the time or money to frequent venues like bars and restaurants.

Cox’s survey found that college-educated adults were more likely to go to restaurants or coffee shops and to strike up conversations with neighbors, compared to people without a college degree. They were also more likely to be members of a neighborhood association, sports league or hobby group (like a book club or regular poker game).

“We put so much of the onus of creating and maintaining friends on individuals instead of institutions,” Cox said. “We’ve shifted all the work, all the effort, onto individuals who now have to coordinate, organize, schedule their social engagements, as opposed to having them occur organically out of the things that they’re already doing.”

People with a college degree were also more likely to be part of a labor union or to regularly attend church, the survey found — two venues that have historically given people with less formal education opportunities to socialize.

The survey even found an educational divide when it comes to free public venues like libraries and parks. Nearly 4 in 10 college-educated adults said they had visited a park or community garden at least once a month in the past year, compared to less than a quarter of those without a college education. And nearly half of college graduates said they had visited a library at least a few times in the past year, compared with a quarter of adults with a high school diploma or less.

“The places that are legitimately free — community centers and libraries — their hours of operation aren’t regular enough for a lot of folks,” Cox said. “Many of those places are closed in the evenings, and then there’s just not enough of them to meet the need.”

Part of the issue may have to do with geography: A 2022 study found that neighborhoods with higher poverty rates have fewer public gathering spaces. And many communities don’t have the money to invest in their public spaces, Cox said.

Limited free time and poor access to transportation likely play a role, as well, said Adam Roth, an assistant professor of sociology at Oklahoma State University, who wasn’t involved in the survey.

“If you live out in the suburbs and you have to change buses or trains or get in your car and do that however-long commute, that is going to be a prohibitive factor,” Roth said.

The story isn’t entirely bleak, though. A collection of surveys from 2022 and 2023 found that even though people in the U.S. desired to be closer to their friends, less than 3% reported having no friends at all. The surveys looked at both close friendships and casual acquaintances.

“Our data didn’t really spell doom and gloom,” said Amanda Holmstrom, a communication professor at Michigan State University who conducted that research. “People have friends — they feel like they don’t necessarily have the time to nurture those friends.”

Casual friendships still offer benefits, of course. Roth said that people report better psychological well-being on days when they have more interactions with a wider variety of people, including ones they barely know. Social interactions in general help reduce or stave off symptoms of anxiety and depression. Face-to-face interactions and engagement in community events have even been linked to lower levels of inflammation.

“The bottom line is, all types of social interactions and relationships matter, particularly for health and well-being,” Roth said. “But the probability of actually experiencing certain types of social interactions is at least partially dependent on the communities we live in.”

Putin Is Getting Rattled

The New York Times

Putin Is Getting Rattled

By Serge Schmemann – August 23, 2024

A picture of Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, sitting at a table. — Credit…Pool photo by Gavriil Grigorov

Mr. Schmemann is a member of the editorial board and a former Moscow bureau chief for The Times.

In purely military terms, Ukraine’s surprise incursion of Russia earlier this month is a dubious gamble. Moscow has not diverted forces from its grinding advances on the Donetsk front, a main focus of the current fighting, and the physical cost in dead or captured troops and evacuated citizens does not concern Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin.

The more significant potential of the invasion lies on the other front — that of information, propaganda, morale, image and competing narratives. That is where the fight is being fought to keep the West involved, to keep Ukrainians hopeful and to get Russians worried about the toll of the war in lives and treasure. And this is where Ukraine may see an advantage.

The very invocation of Kursk, the region where Ukraine made its advance, is familiar to every Russian as the site of not only a great World War II Soviet triumph but also the catastrophic accident that sank a Soviet nuclear-powered submarine in 2000. By moving into Kursk, Ukraine’s military has loudly advertised its boldness just when it looked like its troops might never regain the initiative.

The surprise and speed of the Ukrainian attack and the flaccid Russian response have given new strength to calls by the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelensky, for the United States and his other Western supporters to abandon their insistence that he not use their weapons to attack Russian territory. Mr. Zelensky calls this the “naïve illusion of so-called red lines,” and so far, his allies have not complained about the Kursk invasion. They may see little value in scolding Ukraine, the plucky David in this war, right after he has landed an audacious strike against a plodding Goliath.

Just as important, Ukraine’s move into Kursk highlights the inherent contradiction in Mr. Putin’s propaganda, which portrays the conflict as a proxy war against Western powers trying to deny Russia its destiny, and one in which a calm, united and prosperous Russia is certain to prevail. But that illusion falls apart once Ukrainian forces have succeeded in slicing into Russia and forcing tens of thousands of Russians to flee their homes.Sign up for the Opinion Today newsletter Get expert analysis of the news and a guide to the big ideas shaping the world every weekday morning. Get it sent to your inbox.

The overriding imperative of Mr. Putin’s propaganda, inherited from the Soviet Union, is to enforce the belief that whatever is happening, however grave it may seem and whatever the cost, the Kremlin — Vladimir Putin, to be precise — is in full control. The depth of the disaster precipitated by Russia’s war is revealed by the intensity of the effort — the euphemisms, insinuations, scapegoats and excuses — marshaled toward propaganda.

Mr. Putin, a product of the old K.G.B., is well practiced in this dark art. From the moment the war against Ukraine began in February 2022, he has been ruthless in enforcing a ban against even calling it a war. Russians are subject to arrest if they fail to call it a “special military operation,” even though Mr. Putin himself has occasionally slipped. When the Russian caterer and warlord Yevgeny Prigozhin died in a suspicious plane crash after sending his mercenaries who were fighting in Ukraine to march on Moscow, Mr. Putin kept a straight face as he offered his condolences, noting only that his latest victim had “made serious mistakes in life.”

So when the Ukrainian army launched its unexpected drive into the Kursk region on Aug. 6, the Kremlin propaganda mill got to work. There was no invasion, of course, only an “armed provocation,” a “situation,” a “terrorist attack” or “events in the Kursk region.” And of course, the insidious West was to blame. At a televised meeting at his residence with security chiefs and regional governors six days into the Kursk invasion, Mr. Putin declared that once again, it was “the West fighting us with the hands of the Ukrainians.” He insisted that Russian forces would retaliate appropriately and still accomplish “all our goals.”

When the acting governor of the Kursk region, speaking over a video link, began giving some actual details of the invasion, including the number of towns and villages affected and the amount of territory seized by the Ukrainian army, Mr. Putin sharply cut him off, saying he should leave such detail to the military and focus on the humanitarian response. The poor governor, who probably never imagined having his remote province invaded by anyone, must have assumed that his president wanted to learn what was really happening. Perhaps he was unaware that his job was not to worry the population with facts, but only to show that the government was in control and taking care of its people.

Mr. Putin has so far held firm to the line “We have everything under control.” He has not bothered to visit Kursk, and he has not delivered a rousing speech calling for a grand defense of the motherland. The state-controlled media has focused on showing the government ensuring that evacuees are safe and cared for and that the nation was rallying with an outpouring of humanitarian aid. The latest report from Russia’s emergencies ministry on Tuesday said more than 122,000 civilians had been relocated, including more than 500 in the previous 24 hours, many to shelters across Russia.

At the same time, the Kremlin has not reined in bellicose bloggers and commentators who are demanding a brutal retaliation for Kursk or shaming evacuees for not standing and fighting against the foreign invaders. Such critics actually serve a purpose for Mr. Putin. Hawks who call on an authoritarian ruler to be even more authoritarian are a useful foil, presenting the ruler as relatively reasonable.

Though public opinion is hard to gauge in a country where candor is dangerous, some discontent over Kursk has been gleaned on social media, and it does seem that Mr. Putin has been rattled. His irritation with the acting governor was one sign; another was his display of anger when he declared that the Ukrainian initiative undermined the possibility of negotiations. “What kind of negotiations can we talk about with people who indiscriminately attack the civilian population and civilian infrastructure, or try to create threats to nuclear power facilities?” he asked, oblivious to the rich irony of his words.

Whether the rant revealed that Mr. Putin was considering negotiations or that he was warning the West that it has to keep Ukraine in check if it wants negotiations is unclear. Mr. Zelensky has said only that the goal was to push the Russians further back from Ukraine. Ukrainian forces have made little headway in Kursk after the initial assault, while to the south, Russian troops are advancing on their next major target, the city of Pokrovsk.

Whatever happens next in this unpredictable war, the importance of the information front must not be underestimated. Any operation that raises Ukrainian morale, bolsters Western support and jolts Mr. Putin’s narrative is a battle won.

Serge Schmemann joined The Times in 1980 and worked as the bureau chief in Moscow, Bonn and Jerusalem and at the United Nations. He was editorial page editor of The International Herald Tribune in Paris from 2003 to 2013.

Crime has declined since Donald Trump was president. He insists on lying about that.

USA Today – Opinion

Crime has declined since Donald Trump was president. He insists on lying about that.

Chris Brennan, USA TODAY – August 22, 2024

Former President Donald Trump, in his weeklong attempt to counterprogram the Democratic National Convention, visited Michigan on Tuesday to accuse Vice President Kamala Harris of being soft on crime.

Hold on.

I get that your first thought here might be, “Why would a convicted felon like Trump think he can go after a former prosecutor like Harris on crime?”

Here’s why: Trump has a sliver of statistics to offer and a national sentiment that tends to see crime as a much larger issue than it really is. So first, let’s get a few simple truths out here in the conversation:

Crime rates have been steadily falling in America since the early 1990s but did see a significant increase, especially in murder, in 2020 during Trump’s last year as president as the COVID-19 pandemic spread across the country. The decline in crime rates resumed after he left office.

That’s great for America, but not so great for Trump’s nonstop melodramatic claims that the country is some dystopian hellscape and only by returning him to power can we live in peace and prosperity again.

That’s bunk. Here’s why.

Trump and his campaign pick pieces out of a larger crime puzzle

Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump arrives to deliver remarks on crime and safety at the Livingston County Sheriff's Office in Howell, Mich., on Aug. 20, 2024. — Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump arrives to deliver remarks on crime and safety at the Livingston County Sheriff’s Office in Howell, Mich., on Aug. 20, 2024.

Trump on Tuesday claimed that Harris, as vice president, “presided over a 43% increase in violent crime.”

His campaign later told me that he referred to a Bureau of Justice Statistics report that showed a 42% increase in nonfatal violent crime in 2022. That September report, which is now nearly a year old, also noted that the particular rate of crime had just reached “a 30-year low” during President Joe Biden’s first year in office.

No surprise that Trump left that part out of his speech.

Trump’s lead in Pennsylvania is gone. Vance’s solution: Just don’t believe it. No, really.

Crime statistics are gathered two ways in America: The FBI collects reports from local law enforcement agencies while the Bureau of Justice Statistics conducts surveys each year of a nationally representative sample of about 240,000 people.

Trump really grabbed hold of the second method this week. Why? Because the first method, conducted by the FBI, debunks his lies about America being caught in some terrible, prolonged crime wave.

The FBI data shows crime rates falling in 2022. The bureau’s report for 2023 is expected to be released this October.

Of course, Trump then attacks the FBI for reporting factually about crime

If you’re Trump and a federal agency’s data disproves your claim, what do you do? You attack the agency, of course.

Trump has repeatedly derided the FBI data as “fake numbers” because of a change the agency made in 2021 in how those reports are compiled. That change was long in the planning but happened in the middle of a pandemic, and some law enforcement agencies didn’t immediately switch to the new way of reporting to the FBI.

Will your vote count? Trump supporters are already working against 2024 election results.

Ames Grawert, senior counsel at the Brennan Center For Justice, told me the FBI faced “a data hiccup in 2021” and addressed the problem by collecting information through its previous system and the new system for 2022 and 2023.

Grawert noted that the murder rate is a reliable data point in this discussion because, unlike other crimes, “murder is pretty much always reported.” And “murder is one of the offenses that’s falling fastest nationwide,” he said.

“We have very, very good reason to believe that violent crime is falling in 2023 and 2024 very fast, offsetting much, if not all, of the increase in violence we saw in 2020,” Grawert told me. “And nothing President Trump said (in Michigan Tuesday) really undermines that.”

Truth is crime reporting happens at a slower pace than political rhetoric

Trump won’t let facts get in the way of a horrible story. He suggested on Tuesday that the average American out shopping for a loaf of bread faces a threat of being robbed or shot or raped.

Do you have a loaf of bread in your house right now? If so, did you face an arduous and dangerous journey to obtain it?

Trump is leaning hard on a standard American perception that has been true since long before he entered politics. We tend to believe that the national crime rate is worse than the data shows, even when we don’t see crime as a major threat closer to home.

Democrats are surging: Kamala Harris flexes muscles in Milwaukee and Chicago while Trump campaign goes limp

John Gramlich, an associate director at Pew Research Center, told me that long-standing sentiment was typically stronger in Republicans but has recently become more bipartisan, even as the data shows crime rates are falling.

“Republicans are almost always more likely than Democrats to be concerned about crime or to prioritize the crime issue,” Gramlich said. “But what’s interesting is that people in both parties have become more concerned about it since the beginning of the Biden administration.”

One factor might be helping to prompt that: Crime data takes time to compile. Politics is happening around us every day. Gramlich said a temporary “vacuum” of data can allow “misperceptions to fill the void.”

“An election is a very fluid discussion about what’s happening right now,” he told me, and the lag for the data to catch up “can sometimes be filled with misinformation or fear or any number of other things.”

Are you safe buying groceries?

That’s why Trump was in Michigan this week claiming that Harris “will deliver crime, chaos, destruction and death” if she is elected president.

He held what looked like a healthy lead in the race until last month, when Biden dropped his bid for a second term and endorsed Harris.

Trump, now watching Harris surge with momentum, has been counterprogramming this week by prophesizing America’s doom. The politician who used to say “only I can fix it” is on the ropes and now is road-testing the rhetoric of “only I can save America.”

Trump was president when the crime rates spiked in 2020. That doesn’t mean he’s to blame for that. He certainly wouldn’t accept responsibility for it (or anything else).

Now he’s trying to hang one sliver of statistics on Harris as she pulls ahead of him in the presidential race. Think about that and then ask yourself this: Do you feel safe shopping for a loaf of bread right now in your community? If you do, consider the possibility that people all across America probably feel that way, too.

$15 million Ohio State study takes aim at molecule at the heart of Long COVID

The Columbus Dispatch

$15 million Ohio State study takes aim at molecule at the heart of Long COVID

Samantha Hendrickson, Columbus Dispatch – August 14, 2024

COVID-19 is here to stay, and for some, that means symptoms last months, even years after developing the little-understood Long COVID — but a team at the Ohio State University has received millions to find out more.

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) awarded $15 million over the next five years to fund the university’s efforts, including developing new ways to treat COVID-19 and to further understanding of why Long COVID happens and how to fend it off.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that millions of adults and children have suffered — and continue to — suffer from Long COVID.

Dr. Amal Amer, center with glasses, stands with fellow Ohio State University researchers, who have been granted $15 million over five years to study Long COVID. The research is personal for Amer, who suffered from Long COVID herself.

The disease can be present for as short as three months, but can also last years after someone is first infected. It’s defined as a chronic condition that occurs after a COVID-19 infection with a wide range of debilitating symptoms such as severe fatigue, brain fog, heart and lung problems, bodily pain or exacerbating already existing health issues, all of which can impact someone’s daily life.

“It’s just unacceptable, you can’t just let that happen,” said Dr. Amal Amer, a professor of microbial infection and immunity at OSU and a principal investigator in the project, “We have to understand it, and if somebody, not just us, anybody, happens to have a clue or the beginning of the story, we have to follow it.”

Tiny creatures lead to big discoveries

This massive undertaking started with simple mice and a single molecule.

An OSU study published in 2022 found that mice infected with COVID-19 reacted differently to the disease depending on if they had a certain enzyme-producing molecule known as caspase 11.

More: Steady ‘summer surge’ sees Ohio COVID cases nearly triple in July

Research showed that blocking this molecule in the infected mice resulted in lower inflammation, tissue injury and fewer blood clots in the animals’ lungs.

Humans have their own version of this molecule, or caspase 4, Amer said, and researchers discovered high levels of the enzyme in patients hospitalized for COVID-19 in intensive care units — a direct link to severe disease.

“It starts getting high because it has useful functions, but any molecule, when it gets too high, then these useful functions start becoming harmful,” Amer said.

The new work funded by the NIH will go beyond the study of the lungs and into how this molecule may impact the brain and the rest of the body, interfering with immune responses and possibly resulting in more blood clots in pathways leading to the brain and other vital organs – an entertained explanation for why Long COVID impacts people differently from case to case.

Currently, there are over 200 serious symptoms associated with Long COVID, according to the CDC.

Understanding how Long COVID comes to be is the first step in creating a treatment, Amer said. “Once you know the mechanism, then you can design what to target, where to target it and how to target it in order to reduce the damage being done.”

No one left behind

For Dr. Amer, finding that mechanism is an incredible research opportunity, but it’s also personal.

She herself contracted Long COVID during the pandemic. For three months, the leader in cutting edge research in her field suffered from terrible brain fog and other neurological symptoms after her second, thought seemingly mild, COVID-19 infection.

Amer has traveled all over the world, and confessed she’s gotten sick in many countries, including contracting the often deadly malaria. But nothing compared to Long COVID.

Amer would receive emails from her students, and read one sentence, but not remember what it said after reading it. She started having trouble typing on a keyboard. She couldn’t recall things people had just said to her moments before.

“I started thinking, ‘what’s gonna happen to my life?’ My job is a brain job. I lose my job, then what’s gonna happen to me?” Amer recalled. Now, she’ll head the brain-focused part of the project.

This continued for three months, before she gradually started to recover. Around six months, Amer said she began to feel normal again. Though she can’t be certain that she’s back to where she was before Long COVID, she acknowledges some people aren’t as lucky as she is.

“I have to find out, and I have to understand it, and I’m not going to let anybody be left behind,” she said.

Senators urge better access to disability payments for Long COVID patients

Michigan Advance

Senators urge better access to disability payments for Long COVID patients

Casey Quinlan – August 14, 2024

People with symptoms of long COVID attend a Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions hearing on long COVID in January. A group of senators is now urging the Social Security Administration to grant greater access to disability payments for people with long COVID symptoms. (Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images)

Several U.S. senators have called on the Social Security Administration to take steps to make it easier for people with long COVID to access disability benefits, actions that disability rights advocates and patients say are desperately needed.

Senators Tim Kaine (D-VA), Ed Markey (D-MA), and Tammy Duckworth (D-IL), Bernie Sanders (I-VT), Tina Smith (D-MN), Angus King (I-ME), and Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) signed the letter released on Monday. They said the agency should make the process more transparent, track and publish data on long COVID applications, and consider expanding the listing of impairments the SSA considers in applications for benefits.

“In some situations, these symptoms can be debilitating and prevent an individual from being able to work, take care of their family, manage their household, or participate in social activities,” the senators wrote to SSA Commissioner Martin O’Malley.

Long COVID is a chronic health condition, which often includes fatigue, brain fog, and shortness of breath, following a COVID-19 infection. About three in 10 American adults have had long COVID at some point according to KFF’s April analysis of long COVID data. About 17 million people had it in March 2024. In 2021, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services released guidance on long COVID as a disability under the Americans with Disabilities Act.

Kaine has been outspoken about his own experience with long COVID and Sanders introduced legislation this month to provide $1 billion in funding each year for 10 years to support long COVID research by the National Institutes of Health.

Lisa McCorkell, co-founder of the Patient Led Research Collaborative, a group of long COVID patients and patients with associated illnesses, told States Newsroom, “Creating a ruling or listing would be a huge improvement — having that specific guidance for how to document long COVID, its related diagnoses, and its associated impairment would assist physicians who may not be as knowledgeable about long COVID.”

The SSA administers disability benefits through Social Security Disability Insurance and Supplemental Security Income programs. The former program requires past employment payment into Social Security. The latter one does not have those restrictions and is based on financial need but to receive benefits, applicants have to prove they qualify as having a disability. The average monthly disability benefit for Social Security Disability Insurance is $1,538.

Long COVID’s economic cost

Researchers and economists are still trying to understand the full impact of COVID-19 infections and long COVID on the workforce. A 2023 study estimated that COVID-19 brought down the labor force by 500,000 people and that the average loss of labor is equivalent to $9,000 in earnings. More than 25% of people with long COVID said their condition had an impact on their employment or work hours, according to a 2022 Minneapolis Fed paper.

Long COVID is not going to go away, particularly as government protections on the federal, state, and local level to reduce the spread of COVID are “severely lacking,” said Marissa Ditkowsky, who serves as the disability economic justice counsel at the National Partnership for Women & Families, an organization focused on health, economic justice, and reproductive rights for women and families.

“While COVID continues to be a reality, we know that COVID disproportionately impacts women, disabled folks, and people of color, and the folks who are most impacted already have issues with access to appropriate health care, access to employment, and access to equitable wages,” said Ditkowsky, who has long COVID herself. “A lot of folks might be working in low-wage jobs where they’re in the service industry and constantly out there and more likely to contract COVID. It starts not just with the programs for how to deal with folks with long COVID, but how to prevent people from getting long COVID.”

In the meantime, she said people with long COVID, as well as other people with disabilities, would benefit from the changes senators are advocating, such as restoring the treating physician rule, which was repealed in 2017. The rule allowed the agency to give greater weight to medical evidence from a physician who treated a patient for years compared to, say, a doctor who examines a patient once.

“Giving your own doctor the weight [they] deserve is huge,” Ditkowsky said.

Mia Ives-Rublee, senior director of the disability justice initiative at the Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank, said there is an opportunity for the Biden administration or the next administration to revamp how the agency administers disability benefits. She said that given the aging population, there is more reason than ever for the agency to make significant improvements to the application process. Advocates for people with disabilities say it’s also imperative to boost funding for the agency.

“Not only are we seeing an increase in disability in younger folks, but we’re also looking at the big boomer generation getting older … We’re going to see a huge pressure on the [SSA] and we need to see real changes and funding and think of ways to manage the wide variety of experiences that people have in order to deal with differences in applying for these benefits,” she said.

5 ways Kamala Harris is attacking Trump

Yahoo! News

5 ways Kamala Harris is attacking Trump

Andrew Romano, Reporter – August 1, 2024

Ever since Vice President Kamala Harris took the baton last Sunday from her boss, President Biden, and instantly became the Democratic Party’s new de facto presidential nominee, she has enjoyed one of the most significant “honeymoons” in recent U.S. campaign history.

As a result, the latest polls show Harris closing the gap with Donald Trump in key swing states; pulling even nationally; and surpassing him in terms of favorability and enthusiasm.

Yet all honeymoons come to an end. If Harris hopes to win in November, she will have to differentiate herself from Biden — and convince a decisive number of voters to reject four more years of Trump.

In an attempt to do just that, Harris and her allies have been testing out five main lines of attack: that Trump is “weird”; that he is old; that he is scared to debate; that he is a felon; and that his “Project 2025” agenda is extreme.

Harris has been so committed to these themes that even when Trump questioned her race Wednesday — falsely claiming that she suddenly “made a turn” and “became a Black person” after “only promoting [her] Indian heritage” — she refused to get sucked into a culture war.

“The American people deserve better,” is all Harris said in response.

Meanwhile, Harris’s relentlessly on-message campaign used “Trump’s tirade” as an opportunity to ding his “harmful Project 2025 agenda” and challenge him to “actually show up for the debate on September 10.”

More on the strategic contrasts Harris is trying to draw:

Trump is ‘weird’

When Biden was running, he constantly called Trump a “threat to democracy.”

Harris hasn’t left that line of attack entirely behind. “Do we want to live in a country of freedom, compassion and rule of law, or a country of chaos, fear and hate?” the vice president asked at a recent rally.

But for the most part, Harris and her allies have pivoted to a different anti-Trump message — one that comes across as a lot less alarmist and a lot more … dismissive.

“Some of what [Trump] and his running mate [JD Vance] are saying, it is just plain weird,” Harris said Saturday at her first fundraiser. “I mean that’s the box you put that in, right?”

The new term caught on after Democratic Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota — who has been using it for months — called Trump, Vance and their policies “weird” a few times last week.

“Listen to the guy,” Walz told CNN, referring to Trump. “He’s talking about Hannibal Lecter, and shocking sharks, and just whatever crazy thing pops into his mind. And I thought we just give him way too much credit.”

Now other Harris surrogates are using it too, especially in reference to some of Vance’s recent remarks — and Walz has reportedly become one of Harris’s VP finalists.

So far, the “weird” attack has frustrated Republicans, “leading them to further amplify it through off-balance responses,” David Karpf, a strategic communication professor at George Washington University, told the Associated Press.

It “makes voters feel like Trump is out of touch,” added Brian Ott, a professor of communications at Missouri State University, in an interview with Newsweek. And “it’s hard to claim that it is in any way out of bounds politically, which makes any response to it seem like an overreaction and, well, weird.”

Trump is old

The first time the Harris campaign officially referred to Trump as “weird” was in a press release put out just days after the vice president announced her candidacy. But there was another, more familiar adjective alongside it.

“Trump is old and quite weird,” the statement said. “After watching Fox News this morning, we have only one question, is Donald Trump OK?”

As everyone knows, Biden is the oldest president in U.S. history; at 81, he was also on track to become the oldest presidential nominee in U.S. history until he ended his campaign last Sunday.

Now Trump, 78, has taken his place.

And so Harris, 59, has turned the tables and started describing the former president as someone who is “focused on the past” — while she, in contrast, is “focused on the future.”

For its part, the Harris campaign has been less euphemistic about the nearly two-decade age gap between the two candidates.

“Tonight, Donald Trump couldn’t pronounce words … went on and on and on, and generally sounded like someone you wouldn’t want to sit near at a restaurant, let alone be president of the United States,” Harris spokesperson James Singer said after a recent Trump speech. “America can do better than [Trump’s] bitter, bizarre and backward-looking delusions.”

Trump is scared to debate

On Sept. 10, Trump and Biden were scheduled to debate for the second time this year. But after the president withdrew from the race — and Harris emerged as the new, de facto Democratic nominee — Trump started to backtrack.

“I haven’t agreed to anything,” Trump said on a press call last week. “I agreed to a debate with Joe Biden.” Around the same time, the former president suggested that ABC News should no longer host, calling the outlet “fake news.”

Harris immediately snapped back. “What happened to ‘any time, any place’?” she said in a post on X.

Since then, Trump has said “The answer is yes, I’ll probably end up debating” — while adding that he “can also make a case for not doing it.”

In response, Harris has seized on Trump’s waffling as evidence that “the momentum in this race is shifting” and that “Trump is feeling it,” as she put it Tuesday during a rally in Atlanta — effectively weaponizing the whole situation to question Trump’s confidence.

“Well, Donald,” Harris said in Atlanta, addressing Trump directly. “I do hope you’ll reconsider. Meet me on the debate stage … because as the saying goes, if you’ve got something to say, say it to my face.”

Trump is a felon

Harris debuted as a 2024 presidential candidate last Monday with an appearance at campaign headquarters in Wilmington, Del. She spoke for about 20 minutes — but one passage in particular got the lion’s share of attention.

“As many of you know, before I was elected as vice president, before I was elected as United States senator, I was the elected attorney general, as I’ve mentioned, of California,” Harris said. “And before that, I was a courtroom prosecutor.”

“In those roles, I took on perpetrators of all kinds,” the candidate continued, as laughing, applauding staffers began to realize what was coming next. “Predators who abused women. Fraudsters who ripped off consumers. Cheaters who broke the rules for their own gain. So hear me when I say: I know Donald Trump’s type.”

Since then, Harris has used the same lines in every stump speech she’s delivered.

Biden, of course, would mention Trump’s civil and criminal cases on the campaign trail. But Harris’s résumé lends itself to a novel “prosecutor vs. felon” dynamic — one she could further emphasize by picking any of the former state attorneys general on her vice presidential shortlist when she reveals her running mate next week.

Trump’s Project 2025 agenda is extreme

For months, the Democratic Party has sought to tie Trump to Project 2025, a voluminous blueprint for a second Trump term that was created by the Heritage Foundation (a right-wing think tank) with input from at least 140 people who worked for Trump during his first term.

The reason is obvious. Democrats believe Project 2025 policies — deporting millions of immigrants, eliminating the Department of Education, installing loyalists throughout the federal bureaucracy, reversing federal approval of the abortion pill mifepristone — will be unpopular with the public.

Trump, meanwhile, seems to have come to the same conclusion. After Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts recently said America was “in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be,” Trump took to his Truth Social network to distance himself.

“I know nothing about Project 2025,” the former president claimed. “I disagree with some of the things they’re saying and some of the things they’re saying are absolutely ridiculous and abysmal.”

Earlier this week, the group announced that it was winding down its policy operations and letting go of its director amid pressure from the Trump campaign.

But Harris — who has called Project 2025 a “plan to return America to a dark past” — is not moving on.

“This is his agenda, written by his allies, for Donald Trump to inflict on our country,” Harris spokesperson Julie Chavez Rodriguez said Tuesday. “Hiding the 920-page blueprint from the American people doesn’t make it less real — in fact, it should make voters more concerned about what else Trump and his allies are hiding.”

Trump splits with GOP lawmakers on national security, raising alarm

The Hill

Trump splits with GOP lawmakers on national security, raising alarm

Alexander Bolton – August 1, 2024

National security-minded Republican lawmakers are alarmed by what they see as a growing split between themselves and former President Trump on key issues, including the war in Ukraine, preserving the NATO alliance and protecting Taiwan from Chinese aggression.

Trump’s actions over the past three weeks have stirred confusion and concern among Republican senators who voted earlier this year to approve tens of billions of dollars to contain Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and to deter China from attacking Taiwan, an important U.S. ally and trading partner.

Defense-minded GOP senators viewed Trump’s invitation to Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán to visit him at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida after the NATO summit in Washington as a worrisome development, given Orbán’s close ties to Russian President Vladimir Putin and his efforts to undermine NATO’s support for the defense of Ukraine.

GOP senators who support U.S. involvement in the war in Ukraine were dismayed when Trump selected Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio), who led the opposition to the Ukrainian assistance package, as his running mate.

And Senate Republicans are feeling uneasy about Trump’s assertion that Taiwan should pay more for its defense and refusal to commit to defending the island.

One Republican senator, who requested anonymity, said “it’s a big question” whether Trump will support the war in Ukraine or would come to Taiwan’s defense if attacked by China.

“I don’t think he desires to be in conflict or to pay for conflicts around the world,” the senator observed.

“There’s no question where JD Vance is,” the lawmaker said of Trump’s selection of the Ohio senator as his running mate.

And the senator called Trump’s meeting with Orbán at Mar-a-Lago “concerning.”

“I can’t tell you why he’s doing it,” the lawmaker remarked.

‘Turned the corner’

Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell (Ky.) argued earlier this year that the Republican Party has “turned the corner on the isolationist movement” within its ranks when a majority of GOP senators voted for a $95 billion foreign aid package, which included $61 billion for Ukraine.

But that’s now in doubt after Trump picked Vance to join him on the GOP ticket.

Opponents of continued funding for the war in Ukraine cheered the selection and touted it as a sign Trump would change course if elected in November.

“JD is probably one of the most outspoken individuals about continuing to fuel the flames of that bloody stalemate. I happen to agree with him. I think President Trump does as well,” said Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.), who opposes sending more funding to Ukraine.

Johnson said Vance’s selection as Trump’s running mate “kind of confirms the position of, hopefully, the next administration.”

“The president said he’d end that thing in 24 hours,” Johnson said, referring to Trump’s comments on the war.

Vance told The Hill in April that the $61 billion approved for Ukraine would be the last major assistance package of its kind to get through Congress.

“If Ukraine thinks that it’s getting another $60 billion supplemental out of the United States Congress, there’s no way,” Vance said.

McConnell told reporters he will support the GOP ticket with Vance on it but insisted he’s going to keep arguing for the importance of stopping Russia’s invasion.

“I support the ticket. I also support Ukraine, and I’m going to be arguing, no matter who gets elected president” for deterring Russian aggression, McConnell said. “It’s not just Ukraine, we’ve got worldwide organized authoritarian regimes talking to each other — China, North Korea, Russia, Iran and Iran’s proxies.

“This is a serious challenge,” he warned. “This is the single largest problem facing the democratic world, no matter who wins the election. And that’s what I’m going to be working on the next couple years.”

McConnell didn’t explicitly criticize Trump for meeting with Orbán in Florida but made it clear he views the Hungarian strongman as NATO’s “weakest” member and someone who has undermined U.S. security interests in Europe.

“He’s the one member of NATO who’s essentially turned his country over to the Chinese and the Russians. [He’s] been looking for ways to undermine NATO’s efforts to defeat the Russians in Ukraine. So Viktor Orbán, I think, has now made Hungary the most recent problem in NATO,” McConnell said.

McConnell also spoke out about the need to stand with Taiwan and other Far East allies when asked about Trump’s reluctance to commit to defending the island nation, which is a major source of semiconductors for U.S. industry.

“We don’t know yet who’s going to be the new administration. But it’s pretty clear that our allies in Asia, and now you can add the Philippines to the group, are all concerned about Chinese aggression. They are watching what happens to Russia in Ukraine carefully,” he said.

“This is the clearest example of the democratic world needing to stand up to these authoritarians,” he said. “Reagan had it right. There’s one thing that works. Peace you get through strength.”

Blame for Carlson

Other Republican senators are balking at Trump’s pick of Vance as his running mate and outreach to Orbán.

A second GOP senator who requested anonymity voiced hope that former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who served under Trump, would serve as Defense secretary in a new Trump administration and convince him to stay the course in supporting Ukraine.

The lawmaker blamed the influence of conservative media personality Tucker Carlson in pushing Trump toward Vance and Orbán.

“Not the way I would do it,” the senator said.

A third Republican senator said McConnell and other GOP colleagues aren’t happy with how Trump’s recent moves telegraph how he might run foreign policy out of the White House if he’s elected in November.

“I think Trump goes in and tries to negotiate a deal [to end the war in Ukraine] where they cede certain territory to Putin knowing that Putin can’t walk away a loser. Putin’s only graceful exit from this is Zelensky and company ceding some territory, the Russian-speaking parks of Ukraine,” the senator said, predicting that Trump will lean on Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.

“My guess is that doesn’t sit well with McConnell, at all. But Trump and McConnell have had a pretty rocky relationship,” the source said.

Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.), an outspoken advocate for supporting the war in Ukraine and a McConnell ally, told reporters Wednesday he thinks Trump is open to continued U.S. support for Ukraine.

“If you take a look at the fact that we passed a $60 billion-plus supplemental package [for Ukraine], the House passed it, I’ve got to believe there was some tacit support from Trump … or he could have blocked it,” Tillis said. “It’s on us to convince President Trump why it’s in our best national interest to support Ukraine.”

But other GOP senators are skeptical that Trump will support sending tens of billions of dollars in additional military aid to Ukraine if he returns to the White House.

“His instinct is always toward nonintervention, caution. I don’t know that there’s well-formed philosophy about this is. It’s just his gut. He kind of does this by gut, and his gut is nonintervention,” said a fifth GOP senator who requested anonymity.

Russia vs Ukraine: the biggest war of the fake news era

Reuters

Russia vs Ukraine: the biggest war of the fake news era

Max Hunder – July 31, 2024

KHARKIV, Ukraine (Reuters) – In early April, some residents of Kharkiv received a series of chilling text messages from government officials telling them to flee the city before Russian forces surrounded it.

“Due to the threat of enemy encirclement, we urge the civilian population of Kharkiv leave the city by April 22,” said one alert, which bore the logo of the State Emergencies Service of Ukraine and mapped out safe escape routes on a slick infographic.

It was fake. Volodymyr Tymoshko knew immediately. He’s the police chief of Kharkiv region and would have been one of the first to find out about any official evacuation plans.

“Residents started getting these notifications en masse,” the 50-year-old told Reuters as he shared a screenshot of the alert, sent as Russian troops were massing at the border 30 km away.

“This is a psychological operation, it triggers panic. What would an average citizen think when they receive such a message?”

Disinformation and propaganda, long mainstays of war, have been digitally supercharged in the battle for Ukraine, the biggest conflict the world has seen since the advent of smartphones and social media.

Tymoshko said he received about 10 similar messages via SMS and Telegram messenger in April and early May, the weeks leading up to Russia’s offensive in northeastern Ukraine that began on May 10 and opened up a new front in the war.

A Ukrainian security official, who requested anonymity to discuss sensitive matters, said the Russians frequently sent large numbers of text messages from devices attached to an Orlan-10 long-range reconnaissance drone which can penetrate dozens of kilometres into Ukrainian airspace.

The devices, known as Leer-3 systems, imitate cellular base stations that phones automatically connect to in search of coverage, he added.

The phone barrage was accompanied by a social media blitz as Russian troops advanced on Kharkiv, according Andriy Kovalenko, head of Ukraine’s Centre for Countering Disinformation (CCD), a branch of the national security council.

The average number of social media posts classed as disinformation about the war by Ukrainian authorities spiked to over 2,500 a day when the Kharkiv offensive began in May, up from 200 a day in March, data compiled by the CCD shows.

The CCD chief told Reuters that Ukrainian intelligence had assessed that disinformation campaigns were primarily carried out by Russia’s FSB security service and military intelligence agency, commonly known as the GRU.

Russia’s foreign ministry and the FSB didn’t respond to a request for comment on the Ukrainian assertions, while Reuters was unable to contact the GRU.

Moscow has accused Ukraine and the West of unleashing a sophisticated information war against Russia, using the West’s major media, public relations and technology assets to sow false and biased narratives about Russia and the war.

The Ukrainian security official acknowledged his country used online campaigns in an attempt to boost anti-war sentiment among Russia’s population, although he characterised this effort as “strategic communications” to spread accurate information about the conflict.

BOTS AND MICROTARGETING

Reuters interviewed nine people with knowledge of the information and disinformation war being waged in parallel with battlefield operations, including Ukrainian officials, disinformation trackers and security analysts.

The Ukrainian security official who requested anonymity said that since the full-scale invasion of 2022, intelligence agencies had shut down 86 Russian bot farms located in Ukraine which controlled a collective 3 million social media accounts with an estimated audience reach of 12 million people.

Such facilities are rooms filled with banks of specialised computing equipment that can register hundreds of fake accounts daily on social media networks to pump out false information, the official added, citing one farm that was found by security services in the city of Vinnytsia in central Ukraine last year.

Kovalenko said that at present, the most significant sources of online Russian disinformation were TikTok in Ukraine and Telegram in Europe. Both are widely used in Ukraine.

He said that earlier this year, TikTok had shut down about 30 of the 90 accounts that Ukraine had flagged as Russia-affiliated disinformation spreaders, adding that new accounts often popped up to replace those taken down.

TikTok told Reuters its guidelines prohibited false or misleading content, adding that it had closed down 13 covert influence networks operating from Russia in recent years.

“We prohibit and constantly work to disrupt attempts to engage in covert influence operations by manipulating our platform and/or harmfully misleading our community,” a spokesperson said.

Disinformation networks are groups of accounts controlled by the same entity, and often used to push a coordinated narrative.

Telegram said it was developing a tool to add verified information to posts.

“It is Telegram’s belief that the best way to combat misinformation is not with censorship but with easy access to verified information,” a spokesperson added.

Kharkiv Mayor Ihor Terekhov told Reuters that the Russians were trying to sow panic and distrust, citing an example of social media posts claiming the main road to Kyiv was being resurfaced so that the mayor could flee faster when the Russians came – something he dismissed as a lie.

“They are trying to frighten the population so that people feel uncomfortable and leave the city,” he said in an interview in Kharkiv in late May.

By that time, the frontlines of the conflict in the northeast had stabilised about 20 km from the edge of the city after the Russian offensive had initially gained territory to the north before being blunted by Ukrainian reinforcements.

Maria Avdeeva, a Kharkiv-based security analyst who focuses on Russian disinformation, showed Reuters an infographic map, bearing Ukraine’s state emblem of a trident, posted on Facebook in early April – around the same time as police chief Tymoshko was sent a different evacuation map in a direct Telegram message.

Unperturbed by a loud explosion from a glide bomb a few kilometres away, she explained how the map and accompanying text included fake road closures and claims that missile strikes were expected in specified areas around the city soon.

Microtargeting – which analyses people’s online data to target particular individuals and audiences with specific messages, much like targeted advertising – is complicating the CCD’s task of tracking influence campaigns and countering false narratives, Kovalenko said.

“This activity is notably very tactical,” said John Hultquist, chief analyst at U.S. cybersecurity firm Mandiant, referring to Russian disinformation campaigns in Ukraine.

“We’ve seen targeting all the way down to the Ukrainian soldiers in the trenches.”

AIRSTRIKE TAKES OUT TV TOWER

Ukrainians are particularly vulnerable to digital disinformation; more than three-quarters of the population get their news from social media, far more than any other source of information, according to a study commissioned by USAid in 2023.

That is considerably higher than in any of the 24 European countries surveyed by a 2024 Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism report, which averaged a rate of 44%.

In late April, as Moscow’s forces massed on the border near Kharkiv, a Russian airstrike took out Kharkiv’s main television tower, hindering the city’s access to information.

Dramatic footage obtained by Reuters showed the main mast of the television tower breaking off and falling to the ground.

While the Kharkiv offensive led to a significant spike in disinformation activity, there have been similar Russian campaigns over the course of the war, according to the people interviewed.

The head of the CCD highlighted a Russian campaign in October 2023 aimed at driving home the idea that Ukraine was facing a tough winter and defeat in the war.

Osavul, a Ukrainian disinformation tracking company, showed Reuters its data for this campaign, which it called “black winter”. It counted 914 messages posted by 549 actors which collectively received nearly 25 million views.

Nonetheless, according to Kovalenko, the sheer scale and frequency of Russian influence operations meant Ukrainians were becoming more suspicious of the information they receive, blunting their impact.

The disinformation push during Russia’s initial advance towards Kharkiv at the start of the invasion in 2022 – when they got much closer to the city – contributed to the panic and shock that led to hundreds of thousands of residents fleeing, several officials and experts said.

This time around, only a small number left Kharkiv, even though the amount of disinformation messaging aimed at the city was double the level in March 2022, according to CCD data.

Despite the near-daily missiles and bombs falling on the city – attacks that intensified this May – 1.3 million people remain, according to Kharkiv Mayor Terekhov, roughly the same as before Russia’s latest military incursion in the region.

The comparative lack of panic also reflects Ukrainians’ increasing familiarity with living under attack.

Reuters spoke to nearly two dozen Kharkiv residents in the second half of May, when the city was being hit by several bombs or missiles a day.

Most said they felt no desire to leave and shrugged off the danger, saying they had become used to it. Several said they had stopped following the news.

“This is a psychological mechanism, we get used to danger,” Kharkiv-based psychologist Iryna Markevych said.

In late May, Reuters correspondents dived to the ground for cover when they heard the whistle of a guided bomb piercing the air. Seemingly unfazed, mothers with pushchairs continued to stroll through the park and people bathed at a public fountain.

Yulia Oleshko, 55, a nanny pushing a buggy in a central Kharkiv park, said the best way to get through the nightmare was to simply focus on getting on with everyday life.

“Yesterday I was thinking: walking around Kharkiv is walking around a minefield … but I try not to dwell on these thoughts of fear, otherwise one might fall into depression,” she said.

“We abstract ourselves, otherwise we won’t survive.”

(Reporting by Max Hunder; Editing by Mike Collett-White and Pravin Char)