Category Archives: Viva!

What Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Victory Means

Good on her – I expect that the changing district demographics, as well as her energy, had more to do with election than being “progressive” per se. Progressives in the Democratic Party are fired up. As Joe Crowley learned Tuesday night, they can’t be ignored.

We’ve Found $16.1 Million in Political and Taxpayer Spending at Trump Properties

by Derek Kravitz, Alex Mierjeski and Gabriel Sandoval

Since Donald Trump declared his candidacy for president in late 2015, at least $16.1 million has poured into Trump Organization-managed and branded hotels, golf courses and restaurants from his campaign, Republican organizations, and government agencies. Because Trump’s business empire is overseen by a trust of which he is the sole beneficiary, he profits from these hotel stays, banquet hall rentals and meals.

To arrive at the total, we compiled campaign finance reports from the Federal Election Commission; state government spending gleaned from dozens of state websites and portals; and federal agency expenditure records obtained by the Washington-based transparency organization Property of the People. For this project, Property of the People filed Freedom of Information Act requests with 15 federal agencies and sued four of them to obtain records. (The organization is also attempting to procure comparable records for the Obama era.)

The vast majority of the money — at least $13.5 million, or more than 84 percent of what we tracked — was spent by Trump’s presidential campaign (including on Tag Air, the entity that operates Trump’s personal airplane). Republican Senate and House political committees and campaigns have shelled out at least another $2.1 million at Trump properties. At least $400,000 has been spent by federal, state and local agencies. (For example, the Florida Police Chiefs Association held its summer conference last year at the Trump National Doral Miami.) The state and local tally appears to be a gross undercount because of the agencies’ spotty disclosures and reporting.

The use of taxpayer dollars at Trump hotels is under scrutiny in a closely watched lawsuit in Maryland federal court. The District of Columbia and the state of Maryland sued Trump, citing a venerable anti-corruption provision of the U.S. Constitution known as the Emoluments Clause. It prohibits any financial gift, or emolument, from benefiting a sitting public official, including the president.

Track the Money We’ve Tallied So Far

Paying the President

Track the money that goes into the president’s pocket from political campaigns and taxpayers.

The judge in that case, Peter Messitte, is expected to make a final ruling by the end of July. Last month, he allowed the case to proceed, concluding in his opinion that a trip to the Trump International Hotel in Washington by Maine Gov. Paul LePage “rather clearly suggests that Maryland and the District of Columbia may very well feel themselves obliged, i.e., coerced, to patronize the Hotel in order to help them obtain federal favors.” The nonprofit group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, or CREW, which is co-counsel in the Maryland/D.C. case, is also the plaintiff in a separate emoluments suit, which was dismissed; an appeal of that decision is pending.

One of Trump’s lawyers, Sheri Dillon, has argued in the past that paying a hotel bill would never have qualified as an emolument when the Constitution was written; “instead, it would have been thought of as a value-for-value exchange.” (Countered Norman Eisen, chairman of CREW and a former ethics chief under President Obama, “all of these competing interests are openly and nakedly trying to buy off a president…. Obviously, the government spending, whether it’s federal, state, or local, is a domestic emolument.”)

The Trump Organization and the White House did not respond to requests for comment.

There are few ways to avoid the implication that the use of Trump properties is endorsed by the federal government, said Don Fox, the former acting director of the U.S. Office of Government Ethics, which oversees the government’s ethics rules. One way to avoid the problem, Fox suggested, would be a public statement by Trump along the following lines: “Stay where you need to stay. Basically, do what’s best for the taxpayer.”

But Trump has sent a very different signal with his actions. In his 18 months in office, he has stayed at his hotels or Mar-a-Lago, his Palm Beach, Fla., estate and club, nearly a third of the time: 161 days and counting.

“Trump appears to be commandeering federal resources in order to maximize revenues at Trump properties, and he does this by visiting properties close to the White House,” said Kathleen Clark, a law professor at Washington University in St. Louis and an expert in legal ethics. “And when he travels to the golf courses in Florida, Virginia and New Jersey, other agencies that are involved in supporting the president end up spending money.”

Get ProPublica’s Top Stories by Email

There are no rules barring federal employees from patronizing Trump properties. Employees can be reimbursed for expenditures according to federal travel regulations, including the cost of a hotel room or the price of a meal. There are limits to these per diems — employees cover any cost beyond the reimbursable amount — but rates at many Trump properties are within that range, reimbursement records show. (The General Services Administration provides a handy calculator to figure out what the per diems are depending on where an employee is traveling and when.)

But even if a stay at a Trump property falls within federal travel regulations, it’s hard to escape the fact that the president is personally benefiting from taxpayer dollars — and that federal employees have a potential incentive to curry favor with their ultimate boss.

Consider a trip last year by Matthew Snyder, who works for the Commerce Department’s National Institute of Standards and Technology, or NIST, in Colorado. Snyder traveled to Washington, D.C., for 11 days in April 2017 to attend managerial training. He stayed first at a Marriott in Gaithersburg, Md. (where NIST is headquartered), and then at the Trump International Hotel in Washington. Both rooms cost $242 per night, and both were covered by his per diem for lodging. (According to federal guidelines, $242 is the maximum nightly amount the government will reimburse for visits to the D.C. area in the spring season.)

The Trump International Hotel appeared to cultivate at least some federal business, offering a discounted rate for government employees at the time. (A hotel staffer told us that the Trump International no longer offers a government discount.) Snyder benefitted from such a lowered price. His receipt shows a “room type” code of SK1, which refers to a suite, and a rate plan listed as “DISGOV.” The typical suite at the hotel starts at $740, according to its website.

Matthew Snyder’s Trump International Hotel Washington receipt

Receipts from Matthew Snyder’s stay at the Trump International Hotel Washington, D.C. show room and rate type.

View note

Snyder said in an interview that he chose to stay at the Trump hotel because it was within walking distance of a conference he attended, and that its proximity allowed him to save the cost of renting a car.

But several hotels in a six-block radius provide cheaper rates, including the Hotel Harrington, which sits only a block north of the Trump hotel and charges $175 for a single room. And receipts show that Snyder rented a car and racked up $336 in valet parking charges during his stay at the Trump International.

When asked about cheaper nearby hotels and the parking costs, Snyder wrote in an email: “I could offer clarity, but I choose not to.” In the end, Snyder charged about $2,740 to a government charge card at the Trump International over five days, including room service and valet parking.

In response to questions, the Commerce Department said that records it reviewed “appear to show that a handful of career employees at the Department of Commerce who patronized Trump-owned properties complied with federal travel regulations.” Other Commerce Department employees asked about their spending at Trump properties explained that it was the most affordable option (in one instance involving a hotel in Las Vegas) or that the visit was made while off-duty (in the case of a trip to Los Angeles).

Other federal agencies offered a variety of responses. A statement from the Defense Department, whose employees spent nearly $150,000 at Trump properties between January and June 2017, said its staff are “free to choose where they stay, with the understanding that the government will reimburse no more than the lodging portion of the established per diem limit for the place of temporary duty. There are no plans to change or create guidance at this time.”

The Secret Service also patronized Trump properties while agents were protecting the president or his family. In March 2017, for example, the agency paid $27,724.32 at the Trump golf course and resort in Doonbeg, Ireland. The stay was to “support E. Trump Visit,” receipts note, which took place in April, when Eric Trump went to the resort for two days of business meetings, the Irish press reported at the time.

The State Department, which is listed as the federal agency reimbursing the costs of the Ireland trip, said the Secret Service is in charge of its own travel expenses when it relates to presidential security. For other stays at Trump properties, the State Department said it does “not afford the Trump Organization preferential treatment,” adding that its employees are “routinely counseled on federal ethics law and on the importance of avoiding even the appearance that department resources are misused for the benefit of any outside organizations or private interests.”

The State Department doesn’t receive any preferential treatment when employees stay at Mar-a-Lago, receipts show. For an April 2017 trip by then-Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, his chief of staff and another aide for meetings with Chinese President Xi Jinping, each room cost $546 per night, which was described by the Trump Organization as a “rack rate,” or a non-discounted, standard room. The spending was approved by State Department officials, who noted that the trip was to “meet with POTUS for a high level meeting.”

9572739.gif

Wednesday Open Thread | Judge orders Trump administration to reunite migrant families

And he is like – we don’t need any stinking judges – and we are caught in the middle with caustic supremes on one side and many honorable judges on the other.

A federal judge on Tuesday ruled that U.S. immigration agents could no longer separate immigrant parents and children caught crossing the border from Mexico illegally, and must work to reunite those families that had been split up in custody.

United States District Court Judge Dana Sabraw granted the American Civil Liberties Union a preliminary injunction in a lawsuit filed over the family separations.

More than 2,300 migrant children were separated from their parents after the Trump administration began a “zero tolerance” policy in early May, seeking to prosecute all adults who crossed the border illegally, including those traveling with children.

Border Patrol Agents Detain Migrants Near US-Mexico Border MISSION, TX – JUNE 12: U.S. Border Patrol agents take into custody a father and son from Honduras near the U.S.-Mexico border on June 12, 2018 near Mission, Texas. The asylum seekers were then sent to a U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) processing center for possible separation. U.S. border authorities are executing the Trump administration’s zero tolerance policy towards undocumented immigrants. U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions also said that domestic and gang violence in immigrants’ country of origin would no longer qualify them for political-asylum status.

The ACLU had sued on behalf of a mother and her then 6-year-old daughter, who were separated after arriving last November in the United States to seek asylum and escape religious persecution in Democratic Republic of Congo.

While they were reunited in March, the ACLU is pursuing class-action claims on behalf of other immigrants.

Trump issued an executive order to end the family separations on June 20, but the government has yet to reunite about 2,000 children with their parents.

Before the preliminary injunction ruling, the U.S. government urged Sabraw not to require that it stop separating and quickly reunite migrant families after they illegally cross the U.S.-Mexico border, saying President Donald Trump’s executive order last week “largely” addressed those goals.

The Mexican is the Jew of Fascist Fascism

Here’s a lovely little video of how Donald Trump’s “politically incorrect” rhetoric is infesting our standards of civility.

I’m Mexican American; because my parents aren’t mestizo I count as “white” in Mexico, and to a large although diminishing extent in the US as well.  My three-year-old is even more white, because his mother is of Swedish descent.  But he has my last name, which is more or less recognizably Hispanic, even to the morons who support Trump.  So all “this” — the transformation of Mexicans and Mexican Americans into the prime Other of our current flirtation with fascism — is hitting close to home.

So I’d like to share a few feelings, in a way that I hope advances the causes of civility and mutual understanding.

If you voted for Donald Trump, fuck you.

If you still support Donald Trump, fuck your whore mother. (I’m translating. Feel free to press 1 for Spanish).

Now that we’ve gotten that out of the way, Nancy Pelosi is in dire need of some consciousness raising:

Nancy Pelosi rebuked fellow Democrat Rep. Maxine Waters on Monday for urging her supporters to confront Trump administration officials in their day-to-day lives.

The House Democratic leader’s censure of her colleague highlights the difficult choices Democratic leaders face as they try to leverage energized opposition to the Trump administration and take a House majority in November’s midterm elections. Pelosi has also refused to back efforts by Waters and others to impeach President Donald Trump, calling the push “divisive.”

In a tweeted statement Monday referencing Waters’ comments, Pelosi said that “Trump’s daily lack of civility has provoked responses that are predictable but unacceptable.” She added: “As we go forward, we must conduct elections in a way that achieves unity from sea to shining sea.”

Um, no.  I’m not interested in “unity” with Trumpism, which is now completely identical with the Republican party in its present form.  I’m interested in its total destruction, by whatever means necessary.  Don’t try to placate authoritarian white supremacists: not only is doing so wrong on purely moral grounds, it also doesn’t work.

Speaking of which, Barack Obama needs to get over his delusion, if that’s what it is, that the most useful contribution he can make to American public life right now is to be extremely quiet and well-behaved as the nation is taken over by authoritarian white supremacists. 

 

 

FacebookTwitterGoogle+Share

Oscar Robertson on sports protests: ‘Where are the white athletes?’

3000.jpg?w=300&q=55&auto=format&usm=12&f

  • NBA hall of famer says black athletes need help from teammates
  • Robertson says players must unite to take on owners

NBA hall of famer Oscar Robertson has said white athletes must do more to assist their black teammates in fighting social injustice.

“I think that as people evolve, and things are changing so much in the world with social media and whatnot, these people are young people who have families,” Robertson, who was named an NBA All-Star 12 times in his 14-year career, said. “They’ve seen some injustice in the streets or wherever it might be, it might be almost anywhere, and they’re stepping up. But the only thing that really bothers me is where are the white athletes when this is happening?”

Continue reading…

Seventeen states sue Trump administration over family separations

3500.jpg?w=300&q=55&auto=format&usm=12&f

States including New York, California and Washington filed lawsuits accusing government of denying people their rights

Seventeen US states led by Democratic attorney generals are suing the Trump administration in an effort to force officials to reunite migrant families separated at the border.

In the latest setback for Donald Trump’s “zero-tolerance” immigration policy, the states, which include New York, California and Washington, filed lawsuits on Tuesday accusing the government of denying migrants their rights.

Continue reading…

The Straight-Edge Neo-Nazi Group that Attacked a Ukrainian Roma Camp

Scum spreads unless swamp is drained

According to Ukraine’s Zaxid.net, the recent lethal attack on a Roma camp in Ukraine has been linked by the law enforcement to a popular VKontakte (VK) community called “Sober and Angry Youth” (Твереза та зла молодь Ukrainian, or Трезвая и Злая Молодежь in Russian). The largest page linked to this straight-edge, neo-Nazi group has over 85,000 followers, while there are numerous local “chapters” of the organization across Ukraine, Russia, and other Slavic countries.

Straight-Edge Nazis

The name of the group is from a popular slogan with youth neo-Nazi movements in former Soviet countries, especially Russia and Ukraine. These groups in particular are connected with the straight-edge movement (though not welcomed in any way by the vast majority of straight-edge communities), eschewing drugs and alcohol. In the case of straight-edge neo-Nazis, this abstention from substances is seen as a practice of purity and preparation for attacks on their opponents, including leftists, minority communities, and the government. Notably, the phrase “sober and angry youth” was used as a song title by the St. Petersburg straight-edge punk band Prohibition (Сухой закон), with the lyrics:

While you are sitting around on Vkontakte

Or hanging out with your friends

Every day I’m training,

To fuck up my opponent in a fight.

We are the sober and angry youth!

Fuck off!

This slogan is used by a very popular VK page ran in the Russian language that has been active since 2014, but is actually operated from Ukraine, not Russia. However, this is far from the only “Angry and Sober Youth” group on VK, which almost all use the same logo of a hockey mask, baseball bats, and 14/88, referring to the 14 words.

There are smaller “cells” of the Sober and Angry Youth across Ukraine, Russia, and Belarus, such as in Cherkasy, KyivDnipro, Kryvyi Rih, Minsk, Nizhny Novgorod, and many other cities.

These groups all have similar practices and beliefs in common–neo-Nazism, white supremacy, abstention from alcohol and drugs, hatred towards immigrants, anti-Semitism, fitness and health, and, often, pit bulls. Some of the racist, fascist, and anti-Semitic memes shared in these groups can be seen below, with an emphasis on carrying out violence against migrants and Roma populations.

Rhyme that roughly translates to “clingy, smell gypsy” (Source)

 

Image that roughly translates to “Arm yourself – words won’t stop an occupant, but bullets will.” (Source)

“Hello from Kyiv!” (Source)

While many of the pages are pro-Russian to some degree, the more dominant strain that runs through the Sober and Angry Youth pages, including those based in western and central Ukraine, is pan-Slavism, or a veneration of Rus’ of the Middle Ages. In the image below, from one of these groups, the flags of Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, and Serbia are together, with the phrase “One Blood, One Belief.”

L’viv Youth

Zaxid also claims that the group that carried out the attack on the Roma camp also operated a number of social media pages with the name “Lemberg Jugend”, translating to the Nazi-linked “L’viv Youth” in German. Hromadske has provided screenshots of the group, which has been taken down from YouTube, Telegram, Instagram, and other platforms.

Source: Hromadske

Though Hromadske was not able to independently confirm that Lemberg Jugend is the group linked to the attack, their YouTube channel shared videos showing footage of men attacking Roma camps, and one video is entitled “A small video report from a Gypsy safari” (Маленький відео доклад з сафарі на циган). While many Sober and Angry Youth groups do not have a local focus, this group clearly is meant for neo-Nazi youth in L’viv, matching the attackers who carried out the deadly incident in a L’viv Roma camp.

Source: Hromadske

Largest “Sober and Angry Youth” VK Page

The VK page referenced by Zaxid was run and launched by an individual who uses the name “Svyatoslav Popovich” online.

On June 25, this VK page posted a message that denied involvement with the attack:

“Hello! You may have heard about the “Sober and Angry Youth”, on behalf of which young men in L’viv, Ukraine carried out a pogrom in a Roma camp on June 24. They plagiarized our online resources. Possibly unwittingly, they helped discredit the Sober and Angry Youth in the eyes of the media. We officially state that our organization has no relation to what has been done. Any statements regarding participation of the Sober and Angry Youth in the act that took place on June 24 are lies and slander.”

This page is by far the largest Sober and Angry Youth VK page, and helped spawn the dozens of smaller groups across Ukraine, Russia, and Belarus. As Popovich explains on his personal VK page in 2017, he started the large VK page in 2014 in order to spread the “propaganda of all-around self-improvement, dignity, courage, healthy lifestyle, and so on.” Popovich describes how he was hoping to spread these messages “to the youth of Ukraine, Russia, Belarus, and Serbia, along with other brotherly peoples”, echoing messages of pan-Slavism in neo-Nazi youth movements.

Multiple social media profiles (including Facebook and Instagram) connect Svyatoslav Popovich to Bedevlya, a village on the Ukrainian side of the Ukraine-Romania border and not far from both Lviv and Uzhgorod, the sites of the recent attacks on Roma in Ukraine.

Photograph from Popovich’s Instagram, wearing a Sober and Angry Youth shirt. (Source)

Popovich’s connection to Ukraine appears wholly real, as his multiple Instagram pics are tagged to locations in Ukraine, and he appears in them with individuals from Bedevlya. A Skype account for Svyatoslav Popovych linked to his VK page is also tagged to Bedevlya, Ukraine, further confirming his identity and residence.

Ukraine’s Zaxid.net first reported that a source in the police linking the attackers to “The Sober and Angry Youth” formation, later confirmed by others in Ukrainian police and security services. There are no indications that Popovich is directly related to any of the individuals who carried out the L’viv Roma camp attack, or to the attack itself, though the movement he helped popularize is linked to this attack.

On Monday, Head of Ukraine’s Secret Service, Vasyl Hrytsak remarked that “Russia could be behind it.”

“We really understand that Russia could be behind it, but I can’t say it with 100% certainty, because it wouldn’t be a correct thing to do,” Hrytsak said at a joint press-conference with Ukraine’s Minister of Foreign Affairs.

Hrytsak stated that “a namesake organization was registered in Russia in 2014,” although it’s not clear if he meant if it was formalized in Russia or popped up on the radar there. If he was referring to the large VK group, Hrytsak is mistaken, as Popovich is and was Ukrainian. While the Kremlin has directly funded and supported numerous far-right and neo-Nazi groups in Europe and Russia, most notably through the proxy of billionaire Konstantin Malofeyev, there are no apparent links between the Sober and Angry Youth and the Kremlin other than typical links of pan-Slavism present in many far-right and neo-Nazi groups in the region.

Ukraine’s Minister of Foreign Affairs also claims that, regarding the lethal attack on Roma, Russia has an interest in presenting Ukraine as “a certain radical reality that doesn’t adhere to human rights.”

A report from Zaxid.net also unearthed a Telegram channel in Ukrainian language in connection with the attack and spotted visual parallels with the Misanthropic Division neo-Nazi platform. However, it is not clear how Zaxid determined the link between this particular Telegram channel and the attackers. The Telegram channel is mostly a collection of verbatim translations from a series of uniform and popular Russian-language VK pages under the same banner of the Sober and Angry Youth.

Like with the dozens of other Sober and Angry Youth VK pages, Popovich’s VK page, with over 85,000 followers, openly advocates for Nazism, pan-Slavism, white supremacy, homophobia, and racism, wrapped up in admonitions regarding the dangers of alcohol, drugs, and tobacco. Popovich also sells Sober and Angry Youth merchandise on the page.

Recently the page revealed an interest in recruiting a larger following in Kyiv. A June 22nd post on the popular page encouraging online readers in Ukraine’s capital to get in touch with one of its admins a certain “Ilya Sysoev”.

“Greetings, Sober and Angry Youth! We’re calling on residents of Kyiv: If you’re over 16, you’re healthy and willing to develop the idea, yourself and get new comrades, and you have free time – join us. If you’re willing to join the Stronghold of the Sober and Angry youth, write him.”

The post links to Ilya Sysoev’s VK page. There is little information available on Ilya Sysoev, but his VK page links to a private Instagram profile.

Sober and Angry Youth in Relation to Other Far-Right Groups

The Sober and Angry Youth page’s content, as summarized by Leonid Ragozin on Twitter, shows ideological proximity with the Russian-Ukrainian neo-Nazi platforms Misanthropic Division and WotanJugend, and much of the material on the VK page derives from another group called Rusich, which appears to be run out of St. Petersburg.

The content manifests ideological proximity with the Russian-Ukrainian neo-Nazi platforms Misanthropic Division and WotanJugend. This is basically the radical wing of pre-2014 Russian March which has largely fled to Ukraine and joined their old friends in Azov.

— Leonid Ragozin (@leonidragozin) June 24, 2018

The pages under the brand of Sober and Angry Youth prominently feature slogans that can be traced back to both the Russian and Ukrainian far-right. In particular, the ideology, which includes neo-Paganist symbols and practices among prominent members along with the aforementioned fascist and far-right themes, propagated by The Sober and Angry Youth online group in Russian is not unlike that of prominent members of Ukraine’s C14 and the Azov Regiment and its affiliated structures, the National Corps political party and the National Militia street patrols. C14 specifically carried out a brutal attack on a Roma camp in Kyiv in April 2018, drawing a delayed reaction from Ukrainian authorities. As Christopher Miller at RFE/RL reported, a prominent member of C14 commented on the attack after it took place.

Yevhen Karas of C14 appeared to distance his organization from recent Roma camp attack, which he called a “jostle leaving dead and wounded.” Speaking about the attack on Roma, Karas speculated about “hundreds of Ukrainian women robbed” by Roma.

“Neither violence nor silence on the issue [meaning Roma crime] will solve the problem,” he posted on Facebook. Karas also remarked that he believes his organization’s methods regarding Roma were working, and led the Roma community to address the issue of “criminality” that he claims exists inside the community.

“Tradition and Order,” another far-right group in Ukraine mentioned previously by Human Rights Watch regarding violent attacks on minorities in the country, made light of the lethal attack on Roma. The head of the group, Bogdan Khodakovsky, posted the following message on his Facebook page:

“They call it Nazism and pogroms. But how many Ukrainians were stabbed, poisoned, robbed by Roma in recent years? 100? 200? 1000?”

Many Ukrainian far-right groups have a fervent anti-Russian position in relation to the war in the Donbas, including the formation of armed battalions, as seen with Right Sector’s @Volunteer Ukrainian Corps,@ Azov Battalion, the St. Mary’s Battalion, and so on. In contrast to these groups, the Sober and Angry Youth groups across Ukraine rarely express strong feelings one way or another in relation to the war, instead focusing on issues related to white supremacy, driving out migrants from Ukraine, and outing and attacking LGBT individuals. Ragozin summarized their position succinctly in a recent tweet, saying that the concerns of the Sober and Angry Youth “transcends borders and national loyalties,” with their battle for white supremacy in the region overriding the war between Ukraine and Russia in the country’s east.

Russian neo-Nazis blend into Ukrainian ones in the same way as Russian language blends into Ukrainian via Surzhyk. It’s another dimension, in which common Nazi ideology transcends borders and national loyalties. They are fighting a different war from that of Ukraine & Russia.

— Leonid Ragozin (@leonidragozin) June 24, 2018

To explain his pages’ focus on reaching youth with neo-Nazi propaganda, Popovich quoted from Russia’s neo-Nazi Dmitry Borovikov (1984-2006) and Aleksei Voevodin (currently serving a life sentence in Russia), creators of the Combat Terrorist Organization. Both are cult figures for Russia’s far-right as well as for some in Ukraine.

“So why is it ‘The Sober Youth’ and not society as a whole? As it was said by the right warrior who’s no longer with us, Dmitry Borovikov – ‘You can no longer be changed, we need your children, we’ll cultivate them into the right race.’”

He also cites Hitler — something you will not see among Ukraine’s own high-profile far-right groups — to explain his focus on the youth:

“There’s also a man, still in the hearts of millions, an Austrian painter by the name of Adolf. The following words are attributed to him: ‘He alone, who owns the youth, gains the future.’”

Though Popovich and his VK page have denied involvement with the attack, these quotations, combined with the hostile actions of other far-right groups in Ukraine against Roma camps, fostered an environment both online and on the ground that enabled the tragic attack that took place in L’viv.

Aric Toler and the Conflict Intelligence Team (CIT) contributed research in this article.

The post The Straight-Edge Neo-Nazi Group that Attacked a Ukrainian Roma Camp appeared first on bellingcat.

Trump warns Harley move abroad ′beginning of the end′ | Business| Economy and finance news from a German perspective | DW | 26.06.2018 Trump doesn’t know Thailand not in EU – lol. Trump will throw anyone under the bus – hear that Cohen?

US President Donald Trump has accused Harley-Davidson of using tariffs as an excuse to move production for European customers overseas and threatened the motorbike maker with a “big tax” on its imports to the US.

Source: Trump warns Harley move abroad ′beginning of the end′ | Business| Economy and finance news from a German perspective | DW | 26.06.2018

Sci. Reports: Efficacy Of AI Vaccines Against The H5N8 Virus in Egypt

The good, the bad and the ugly.

poultry%2Bvaccination.png

,385

While we may not be getting all of the data out of China, the remarkable drop in reported outbreaks of H7N9 avian influenza since last fall (see chart below) – which closely follows last summer’s nationwide deployment of a newly developed H7+H5 poultry vaccinehas to be viewed as a very encouraging sign. 

H7N9%2BEpi%2BChart.png
Credit FAO


How long this lull will last remains to be seen, as antigenic changes in the circulating viruses – or the emergence of a new subtype – may eventually derail  the vaccine’s success.  

But for now, China’s MOA appears to have hit a home run. 

The use of AI vaccines is not without controversy, and while China, Egypt, Indonesia, Vietnam and Hong Kong have embraced them, most countries around the world eschew their use.

Aside from complicated international trade issues, the biggest concern is that most AI poultry vaccines are only able to suppress avian flu viruses to reduce morbidity and mortality in poultry, but they don’t necessarily eliminate them.    

And as avian viruses evolve, over time existing poultry vaccines become increasingly less effective. Poor vaccine matches can then allow AI viruses to spread silently among flocks, to continue to reassort and evolve, and potentially lead to the emergence new subtypes of avian flu.

A few earlier blogs on those concerns include:

Subclinical Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza Virus Infection among Vaccinated Chickens, China).

Study: Recombinant H5N2 Avian Influenza Virus Strains In Vaccinated Chickens

EID Journal: Subclinical HPAI In Vaccinated Poultry – China

There are, however, some strong advocates for using AI poultry vaccines, who see their proper use as being the only reasonable course of action for countries where these viruses are firmly entrenched.

Earlier this month I received a comment from Les Sims, who outlines his reasons in the following hour-long FAO webinar

https://fao.adobeconnect.com/_a1026619000/pdrcoyuni1bz/?launcher=false&fcsContent=true&pbMode=normal

Admittedly, the apparent success with China’s recent vaccination program suggests that modern vaccines, when properly and consistently applied, can have a positive effect. 

But far too often, we’ve seen badly outdated, illegally obtained, and sometimes even home brewed vaccines used in the field (see Taiwan’s Counterfeit AI Vaccine Trade). Vaccination coverage in many  places has been spotty and intermittent, and the results have been less than satisfactory. 

In 2012’s Egypt: A Paltry Poultry Vaccine, we saw a study conducted by the Virology department at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital that looked at the effectiveness of six commercially available H5 poultry vaccines then deployed in Egypt, and found only one (based on a locally acquired H5N1 seed virus) actually appeared to offer protection.

Five months ago, in PLoS One: Effectiveness of HPAI H5N1 Vaccination in Poultry – Indonesia, we saw another study that painted a less than impressive picture of poultry vaccination effectiveness in Indonesia.

The authors cited frequent low HI titres in poultry even after three rounds of vaccines, vaccination failures, and warned of silent infections and the generation of new H5N1 antigenic variants.  

Fast forward to today, and we have a new study published in Nature’s Scientific Reports on the efficacy of Egyptian poultry vaccines in light of the arrival (in late 2016) of the clade 2.3.4.4. HPAI H5N8 virus.   

Many of the authors contributed to the 2012 paper mentioned above, and the results are eerily similar to what was reported nearly 6 years ago.

Efficacy of commercial vaccines against newly emerging avian influenza H5N8 virus in Egypt
Ahmed Kandeil, Jamal S. M. Sabir, Ahmed Abdelaal, Ehab H. Mattar, Ahmed N. El-Taweel, Mumdooh J. Sabir, Ahmed Aly Khalil, Richard WebbyGhazi Kayali & Mohamed A. Ali

Scientific Reports volume 8, Article number: 9697 (2018 )

Abstract

The newly emerging, highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI) H5N8 virus of clade 2.3.4.4 was recently detected in wild birds and domestic poultry in Egypt in the 2016/2017 winter season. Vaccination based on commercial H5 vaccines is used as an essential control strategy in Egyptian poultry.

Here, we studied the efficacy of the eight most common commercial H5 poultry vaccines in the Egyptian market and compared them with an experimental vaccine based on the Egyptian LPAI H5N8 virus that was prepared by using reverse genetics.

The experimental vaccine and Re-5 commercial vaccine were able to completely protect chickens and significantly reduce virus shedding.

Our results indicate that most of the commercial poultry H5 vaccines used in the present study were ineffective because the seed viruses in these vaccines are genetically distinct from the H5N8 viruses currently circulating in Egypt.

Although some of the commercial vaccines protected chickens from mortality, they failed to prevent chickens from shedding the virus. Accordingly, we recommend updating and reinforcing the H5N8 prevention and control strategies in Egypt. The vaccination strategy should be reconsidered based on currently circulating viruses.

        (SNIP) 

The experimental homologous H5N8 vaccine provided the best protection against a challenge with the clade 2.3.4.4 virus. The sera of chickens vaccinated with the Re-5 Merial, Zoetis, EgyFlu, CEVac Flukem and Volvac (B.E.S.T.) vaccines showed reduced cross-reactivity against the Egyptian H5N8 virus and provided ≥ 80% protection, while the Nobilis, ME Flu VAC, and SERA-VAC vaccines did not reach the protection limit recommended by the OIE. 

The Re-5 Merial (based on a clade 2.3.4 H5N1 virus) vaccine protected the chickens from mortality and reduced virus shedding. Most of the commercial vaccines protected chickens from mortality but did not reduce or prevent virus shedding. This suggests that the circulating H5N8 viruses may evade vaccine protection.

The genetic dissimilarity and poor reactivity between the H5 commercial vaccines used in Egypt and the currently circulating H5N8 viruses proves that the vaccines might not be effective in the field or may introduce only partial protection and thus could lead to vaccine-induced escape mutant strains.

        (Continue . . .)

In many developing countries, poultry and eggs are not only prime sources of badly needed and relatively inexpensive protein, they are often a measure of an individual’s wealth. The wholesale culling of poultry, whether commercial or backyard , can have dramatic economic and societal effects (see Iran: Bird Flu, Food Insecurity & Civil Unrest).

No government is more aware of this fact than China, and so when HPAI H7N9 emerged in early 2017, the decision to go on the offensive with an experimental H5+H7 vaccine was viewed as a matter of national security.

While modern AI poultry vaccines hold a lot of promise – and would likely better the lives of millions of people in low resource countries dealing with endemic avian flu – they have to be frequently updated and correctly applied, if they are to be effective.

But all too often we see exactly the opposite in the field. 

Until that changes, and we see more success stories like what we’ve seen this past year out of China, the global reluctance to embrace AI vaccines will likely remain unchanged.