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Trump Timeline ... Trumpocalypse
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One month before a purported leak of files from Hunter Biden's laptop, a fake "intelligence" document about him went viral on the right-wing internet, asserting an elaborate conspiracy theory involving former Vice President Joe Biden's son and business in China.
The document, a 64-page composition that was later disseminated by close associates of President Donald Trump, appears to be the work of a fake "intelligence firm" called Typhoon Investigations, according to researchers and public documents.
The author of the document, a self-identified Swiss security analyst named Martin Aspen, is a fabricated identity, according to analysis by disinformation researchers, who also concluded that Aspen's profile picture was created with an artificial intelligence face generator. The intelligence firm that Aspen lists as his previous employer said that no one by that name had ever worked for the company and that no one by that name lives in Switzerland, according to public records and social media searches.
One of the original posters of the document, a blogger and professor named Christopher Balding, took credit for writing parts of it when asked about it and said Aspen does not exist.
Despite the document's questionable authorship and anonymous sourcing, its claims that Hunter Biden has a problematic connection to the Communist Party of China have been used by people who oppose the Chinese government, as well as by far-right influencers, to baselessly accuse candidate Joe Biden of being beholden to the Chinese government.
IT WAS outrageous enough that a deadly nerve agent was used in an assassination attempt against Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny, who survived. But the story is not over. Now, a group of news outlets has exposed what they describe as clandestine Russian organizations carrying out illegal chemical weapons development concealed as civilian research.
If these reports are true, they add a major dimension of concern to the attempted killings of Mr. Navalny in August and former military intelligence officer Sergei Skripal and his daughter in March 2018 in Salisbury, England. The Chemical Weapons Convention prohibits the development, production, acquisition, stockpiling, retention, transfer or use of chemical weapons. President Vladimir Putin says Russia has strictly adhered to its commitments under the treaty, but these reports suggest otherwise.
The reports are by the open-source investigations outfit Bellingcat; the Insider, a Russian news organization; Germany’s Der Spiegel; and the Russian service of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. They found cellphone and text message logs that point to previously unknown involvement of two organizations and several scientists in the use of Novichok, a class of nerve agents created by the Soviet Union in the last years of the Cold War, against the Skripals. The news organizations reported that the St. Petersburg State Institute for Experimental Military Medicine of the Ministry of Defense, as well as the Scientific Center Signal, had taken the lead in weaponizing Novichok agents. Neither of these two organizations was cited in the recent European Union and British sanctions against Russia in response to the attack on Mr. Navalny.
NEW YORK (AP) — A president who downplayed the coronavirus threat, scorned masks and undercut scientists at every turn. Governors who resisted or rolled back containment measures amid public backlash. State lawmakers who used federal COVID-19 aid to plug budget holes instead of beefing up testing and contact tracing.
As a powerful new wave of infections sweeps the U.S. just ahead of Election Day, the nation’s handling of the nearly 8-month-old crisis has been marked by what health experts see as grave missteps, wasted time and squandered opportunities by leaders at all levels of government.
The result: The country could be looking at a terrible winter.
“The inconsistency of the response is what’s been so frustrating,” said Dr. Irwin Redlener of the National Center for Disaster Preparedness at Columbia University. “If we had just been disciplined about employing all these public health methods early and aggressively, we would not be in the situation we are in now.”
Though Redlener sees some of the new wave as inevitable, he estimates at least 130,000 of the nation’s more than 227,000 deaths could have been avoided had the country more widely embraced masks and social distancing.
The rest of us, however, must ask ourselves questions that transcend politics. We have to ask ourselves about our duty as citizens, about who we are, about how we want to talk to each other, to our families, to our children and grandchildren about what we did at this moment of national crisis. We are living through the most dangerous time in our modern history since the reign of terror led by the odious Joseph McCarthy. It's a worse time, in fact, because at least we didn’t make McCarthy president. Now, as in the 1950s, we have to decide what we stand for.
This is not some nebulous appeal to history. History will not have to judge Trump; he is in the dock even now because we already know everything we need to know about him. We know that the 45th president is a compulsively dishonest and emotionally unstable man, compromised by foreign powers and hostile to the basic rules of American democracy. We know that he surrounded himself with an entourage of liars and opportunists. We know that he has trampled on our laws, our Constitution and our traditions for his personal gain.
As Trump's failed presidency limps into the final stages of its first term and he trails Joe Biden by historic margins, a key media myth is being burst right before our eyes. Instead of the deeply "polarized," bitterly divided country the press insists we have become, where every hot-button issue divides the nation by a razor-thin 51-49 margin, we're seeing swelling momentum of agreement. Poll after poll confirms the tide is moving away from Trump and away from the conservative agenda in America.
Picking up the electoral energy that was ignited during the 2018 midterm elections, a wide coalition of voters are not only opposing Trump, but are rejecting Republican initiatives across the board in large numbers. A silent majority of sorts, this partnership is often ignored by the press, which seems wed to the idea of portraying America as being impossibly divided in the age of Trump. In truth, Trump is helping to unite the country.
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