
South African authorities paid five times the recommended price for PPE, the auditor general finds.

South African authorities paid five times the recommended price for PPE, the auditor general finds.
E-commerce giants Amazon and eBay continue to sell thousands of items promoting QAnon, even as social media companies crack down on the dangerous conspiracy theory that the FBI has called a “domestic terror threat.”

Le Kirouac Bar said it is closed until Sept. 9 following at least 30 COVID-19 cases linked to the establishment.

With just over 60 days to the 2020 election, Facebook and Twitter have announced that the Kremlin-backed organization that interfered in the 2016 election is once again targeting Americans with disinformation.
The announcement is the first evidence that St. Petersburg-based Internet Research Agency is seeking to repeat its success of four years ago and disrupt the U.S. presidential election. And while this campaign was ultimately unsuccessful, it showed that the Kremlin is repeating the strategy it pursued four years ago, by persuading left-leaning voters that Joe Biden is too centrist.
The accounts taken down by Facebook and Twitter were designed to amplify a website called PeaceData, which advertises itself as an independent news outlet in English and Arabic.
Facebook said it had removed 13 accounts and two pages, which sought to “target public debate in the U.S.” and other countries, including the U.K. and Egypt. Twitter said it had removed five accounts for “platform manipulation that we can reliably attribute to Russian state actors.”
Both platforms stressed that the campaign was in its very early stages and as a result had very limited impact.
Indeed just 5% of the content of the site related to the 2020 election, according to Ben Nimmo, director of investigations at social media monitoring company Graphika, who wrote a report on the campaign.
However, Nimmo and his colleagues concluded that the campaign was designed to sway left-leaning voters in the U.S. away from voting for Biden.
“The operation conducted its targeting with pinpoint precision,” Graphika’s report said. “English-language Facebook assets run by the operation itself focused very heavily on a small number of political groups, including Democratic Socialists, environmentalists, and disgruntled Democrats in the United States.”
By doing this, the Kremlin was seeking to target an audience of left-leaning voters in the U.S. who it believes can be dissuaded from supporting the more centrist leadership of the Democratic Party.
“This facet of the operation suggests an attempt to build a left-wing audience and steer it away from Biden’s campaign, in the same way that the original IRA tried to depress progressive and minority support for Hillary Clinton in 2016,” Graphika said.
The White House has been silent on the threat posed by Russia ahead of November’s vote and last week it was revealed that Congress would no longer receive in-person briefings about election security and interference in the run-up to the vote.
However, U.S. intelligence agencies have been warning for months about the threat from Moscow, and it was a tip from those same agencies, fed through the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force, that first alerted Facebook and Twitter to the IRA’s latest effort.
While the campaign’s social media accounts used fake names and profile pictures created using deepfake technology, the IRA was able to recruit freelance journalists to contribute content to the website.
One writer, who spoke to the New York Times, said he was happy to be paid for his work — earning just $75 per story — and that he was told to write content on whatever themes he wanted.
The writer’s articles, before he unwittingly worked for the IRA, questioned whether Biden represented the progressive values of the Democratic Party and whether he deserved the vote of left-wing Americans. It’s not clear what he wrote about for the fake IRA news site.
Soon after Facebook and Twitter announced the takedowns, the site, which is still online, denied that it was a front for a Russian disinformation campaign.
Cover: Democratic presidential candidate former Vice President Joe Biden gestures before boarding a plane at New Castle Airport in New Castle, Del., en route to speak at a campaign event in Pittsburgh, Pa., Monday, Aug. 31, 2020. (AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster)
“The reality is, unless you’re doing routine testing, you’re not going to be able to identify those kiddos who are asymptomatic and presymptomatic,” Cervantes said. “Schools have to come in with the assumption that there will be positive children walking around their hallways every day. … They feel fine, they look fine, but they are spreading the virus.”
Desks are spaced out in a classroom at Ott Elementary School in San Antonio. Experts say mitigation measures will be critical to preventing coronavirus outbreaks.
Credit: Allie Goulding/The Texas Tribune
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Ideally, students and teachers returning to classrooms this fall would be tested for the novel coronavirus “as much as in major league sports,” says Diana Cervantes, an epidemiologist at the University of North Texas Health Science Center. In Texas, that will not happen.
With no plans for widespread testing and a virus still spreading quickly in many communities, “schools should be prepared to have infected individuals show up,” said Spencer Fox, a University of Texas at Austin researcher who models coronavirus risks.
Infections are inevitable in schools, and administrators will face the challenge of keeping them from growing into outbreaks that force school shutdowns and spark community hot spots. Employing many mitigation measures, experts say, is the best strategy: mask-wearing, hand-washing, keeping students in isolated cohorts, ensuring proper ventilation and holding class outside whenever possible.
The many Texas schools preparing for in-person classes next week will be largely on their own to devise precautions against a virus that spreads silently in as many as 40% of those it infects. Guidance from the state education agency is heavy on recommendations, light on requirements. In many districts, there will be soap and hand sanitizer aplenty, social distancing and physical barriers where possible, and no required testing.
Many experts believe that community spread will be the inevitable result.
“The reality is, unless you’re doing routine testing, you’re not going to be able to identify those kiddos who are asymptomatic and presymptomatic,” Cervantes said. “Schools have to come in with the assumption that there will be positive children walking around their hallways every day. … They feel fine, they look fine, but they are spreading the virus.”
Balanced against health concerns are the educational needs of the more than 5 million public school students in Texas. Experts say students learn best in schools, and in-person classes are especially important for students with disabilities. In many parts of the state, students learning remotely will receive a worse education, some struggling just to get online. And for many children, being in school means food, medical care and a refuge from abuse.
The American Academy of Pediatrics has said districts “should start with a goal of having students physically present in school,” but also acknowledged that “the current widespread circulation of the virus will not permit in-person learning to be safely accomplished in many jurisdictions.”
Cases are still growing in Texas, and the share of coronavirus tests that turn up positive is around 10% — a figure Gov. Greg Abbott called a “warning flag,” and far higher than the 5% benchmark some experts say communities should be below before reopening schools.
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention does not recommend universal testing in schools, and bare-bones guidance from the Texas Education Agency does not encourage testing asymptomatic staff members or students as a prevention strategy. That’s in part because large-scale testing in the U.S. generally, and in Texas in particular, is still not feasible.
Over the last week, Texas performed an average of about 45,000 viral tests per day. The Houston Independent School District alone has well over 200,000 students.
Still, some large districts across the nation are making an attempt. The Los Angeles Unified School District plans to test 700,000 students and 75,000 staff members. And Detroit public schools plan to require negative COVID-19 tests for all in-person staffers, with the hope that there will be enough testing capacity for all students.
Many of Texas’ biggest districts — Houston ISD, Dallas ISD, Austin ISD and El Paso ISD among them — will not require testing of anyone at any point. Individuals who know or suspect they have COVID-19 will be instructed to stay at home through the 14-day incubation period, according to state guidelines. But they can return to campus without being tested if they show improvement over a specified period of time.
“Very few [districts] will probably have access to testing. But we know some things about the epidemiology of the disease. Even if you don’t have a lot of testing, at a minimum, if you distance the kids and if everybody over 2, including the teachers, wears masks, and people don’t come back to school sick, you should be able to control the number of infections in your school,” said Dr. Yvonne Maldonado, a Stanford pediatrics and infectious disease expert who is advising Los Angeles schools on testing. “I’m not saying you’re going to have zero, but you can probably control the number.”
Each individual prevention measure is somewhat effective, but “altogether they can be very effective,” Cervantes said. “Layer on all of those things.”
Some Texas districts that are open for in-person classes have already reported coronavirus cases, and experts expect those numbers will grow as more children return to classrooms.
Dumas ISD, a Panhandle community hit hard by the coronavirus this spring because many in Moore County work at a meatpacking plant, has already seen coronavirus cases since it opened weeks ago, but the numbers have been manageable, Superintendent Monty Hysinger said.
With football starting, “I think those numbers will elevate slightly,” Hysinger said.
“I’m hoping we kind of find our balance point there, and we can just maintain that,” he said. “Right now it doesn’t look like it’s going to be out of line.”
The district is taking safety precautions — mandating frequent hand-washing and sanitizing, hiring additional janitorial staff. But some of the best practices that scientists recommend are simply not feasible.
“We can’t promise, and we haven’t promised, our parents that we can socially distance,” Hysinger said. “We just don’t have the space, and I don’t know of a district in the state that has the space.”
Dumas, like many districts across Texas, is asking parents to screen their kids before they come to school each morning. The TEA says schools must require staff to self-screen for coronavirus-like symptoms, and parents must not send children to school if they suspect they may be sick. But screening is likely to miss asymptomatic cases — as are common mitigation strategies like temperature checks.
San Elizario ISD, near El Paso, has spent about $64,000 on 24 temperature-scanning kiosks placed at the employee and student entrances of each campus. It also spent $5,000 on no-contact thermometers for bus drivers to screen students before they get on buses.
But the TEA does not recommend school districts regularly check otherwise asymptomatic students for fevers, since many students with COVID-19 do not have any symptoms.
Financial constraints will also limit districts’ efforts. The governor has promised to reimburse a portion of expenses related to COVID-19, but many districts are concerned that won’t fill the holes in their budgets.
Outside Texarkana, in Maud ISD, where classes have already begun, administrators delayed construction projects so they could afford to hire more janitorial staff and add a bus route. The district could not afford high-tech temperature gauges, so teachers have had to start checking kids’ temperatures at the door.
“Anything we felt was nonessential we stopped last spring” to save money, said Superintendent Chris Bradshaw. “We don’t have lots of money sitting there waiting for us to find a way to spend it.”
Research shows that children are less likely to suffer severe symptoms of COVID-19 than are adults. But kids with preexisting conditions like asthma or diabetes may be especially vulnerable. And children — even when they are not showing symptoms — can transmit the virus. Early research shows older kids may be more likely to transmit the virus than younger children, but scientists are still studying the question.
In some ways, it’s “a big experiment,” given how little is known about children’s vulnerability to and role in spreading the virus, said Catherine Troisi, infectious disease epidemiologist at UTHealth School of Public Health in Houston.
State health and education officials will provide weekly updates on how many cases school districts report among their staff and students. But it will be difficult to draw conclusions from that data alone about how risky reopening has proved, because there will be limited information about who is catching the virus in which schools. And it’s unclear whether the state will report how many districts are open in person or how many students are attending schools in person, so it may be impossible to say what share of students attending Texas schools have gotten sick there. Districts will also be required to report to the state whether cases were contracted on or off campus — a question that will be difficult to answer without robust testing and contact tracing efforts.
Some school districts, including Longview ISD in East Texas and Premont ISD in South Texas, are exploring plans to test students and staff.
But in many places it is out of reach financially, is impractical given limited resources or feels politically impossible.
“I think my folks would have a heart attack if I was like, ‘We’re doing random testing tomorrow,’” said John O’Brien, superintendent of Van Vleck ISD, a district of about 1,000 students in Matagorda County near the Gulf Coast. “Being in a very rural community, a conservative community, I have a lot of folks that think this is all baloney. This is like the flu. And I don’t believe that, and to be honest, none of my folks at school do.”
O’Brien said he believes the district has gone above and beyond — requiring people to self-scan before entering the building, putting UV light into the heating and air-conditioning systems to purify the air, spending $9,000 on three thermal cameras to alert when people with high temperatures are walking down the halls — but that testing would be a no-go unless the state required it.
“If we have a kid get sick, we tell mom, we can’t make them go get tested, but we can say, ‘Hey, we highly recommend you do,’” he said.
Aliyya Swaby contributed reporting.
Disclosure: The University of Texas at Austin and the University of North Texas Health Science Center have been financial supporters of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in the Tribune’s journalism. Find a complete list of them here.
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Facebook said on Tuesday that a Russian influence operation posed as an independent news outlet to target left-wing voters in the United States and Britain.
The social media giant added that the operation centered around a pseudo media organisation called Peace Data and included recruiting freelance journalists to write about domestic politics. On its website, Peace Data says it is a non-profit news organisation seeking “the truth about key world events”. However, the investigation found that the three permanent staff listed online are not real.
On Monday, Facebook said it suspended the accounts before they gathered a large online following.
The company also said its investigation “found links to individuals associated with past activity by the Russian Internet Research Agency”, a St Petersburg-based company which US intelligence officials say was central to Russian efforts to influence the 2016 presidential election.
According to investigators, Peace Data targeted left-wing groups in the US and Britain, and “paid particular attention to racial and political tensions”, including civil rights protests and criticism of US president Donald Trump and his Democratic rival, Joe Biden.
Russia has repeatedly denied US allegations of interference in other countries’ elections.

Internet Research Agency also hired real, unwitting freelance reporters in operation Facebook has removed
The Russian agency that interfered in the 2016 US election created a fake leftwing news publication, staffed it with fake editors with AI-generated photos and hired real freelance reporters as part of a fresh influence operation detected and removed by Facebook, the company said on Tuesday.
The latest operation by the Internet Research Agency (IRA) was still in its early stages when it was detected thanks to a tip from the FBI, according to Facebook’s head of security policy, Nathaniel Gleicher. The network had 13 accounts and two pages, with about 14,000 total followers.

Twitter removed a video from a mid-August tweet by President Trump that featured Eddy Grant’s hit song “Electric Avenue” after the musician …
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