On Thursday, First Lady Melania Trump delivered a pre-recorded message to the American people as part of CNN's coronavirus town hall.
There’s a meme that appears now and then on Facebook and other social media: “Those who don’t study history are doomed to repeat it. Yet those who do study history are doomed to stand by helplessly while everyone else repeats it.”
That’s funny. What’s not is that the Trump administration and its coterie of China-bashers, led by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and aided by Arkansas Republican Senator Tom Cotton, have recently been dusting off the fake-intelligence playbook Vice President Dick Cheney used in 2002 and 2003 to justify war with Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. At that time, the administration of President George W. Bush put enormous pressure on the U.S. intelligence community to ratify spurious allegations that Saddam Hussein was in league with al-Qaeda and that his regime had assembled an arsenal of nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons. Fantasy claims they may have been, but they did help to convince many skeptical conservatives and spooked liberals that a unilateral, illegal invasion of Iraq was urgently needed.
This time around, it’s the Trump administration’s reckless charge that Covid-19 -- maybe manmade, maybe not, advocates of this conspiracy theory argue -- was released perhaps deliberately, perhaps by accident from a laboratory in Wuhan, China, the city that was the epicenter of the outbreak late last year. It’s a story that has ricocheted around the echo chambers of the far right, from conspiracy-oriented Internet kooks like Infowars’ Alex Jones to semi-respectable media tribunes and radio talk-show hosts to the very highest reaches of the administration itself, including President Trump.
Unlike with Iraq in 2003, the U.S. isn’t planning on going to war with China, at least not yet. But the Trump administration’s zeal in shifting attention from its own bungling of the Covid-19 crisis to China’s alleged culpability in creating a global pandemic only raises tensions precipitously between the planet’s two great powers at a terrible moment. In the process, it essentially ensures that the two countries will be far less likely to cooperate in managing the long-term pandemic or collaboratively working on vaccines and cures. That makes it, as in 2002-2003, a matter of life and death.
Iraq Redux?
Back in 2002, the Bush administration launched an unending campaign of pressure on the CIA and other intelligence agencies to falsify, distort, and cherry-pick intelligence factoids that could be collated into a package linking al-Qaeda and weapons of mass destruction to Saddam Hussein’s Baghdad. At the Pentagon, neoconservatives like Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz and Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith set up an ad hoc team that eventually took on the name of Office of Special Plans. It was dedicated to fabricating intelligence on Iraq.
Just in case the message didn’t get across, Vice President Cheney made repeated visits to CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, to badger analysts to come up with something useful. In 2003, in “The Lie Factory,” which I co-authored with Jason Vest for Mother Jones, we reported on how Wolfowitz, Feith, allied Defense Department officials like Harold Rhode, and neoconservative apparatchiks like David Wurmser, then a senior adviser to Iraq-war-touting State Department Undersecretary John Bolton (and now an unofficial advisor to Donald Trump on Iran), actively worked to purge Pentagon and CIA officials who resisted the push to shape or exaggerate intelligence. A year later, veteran spy-watcher James Bamford described the whole episode in excruciating detail in his 2004 book, A Pretext for War.
In 2020, however, President Trump is not just pressuring the intelligence community, or IC. He’s at war with it and has been busy installing unprofessional know-nothings and sycophants in top positions there. His bitter antipathy began even before he was sworn into office, when he repeatedly refused to believe a sober analysis from the IC, including the CIA and FBI, that President Vladimir Putin of Russia had aided and abetted his election. Since then, he’s continually railed and tweeted against what he calls “the deep state.” And he’s assigned his authoritarian attorney general, Bill Barr, to conduct a scorched-earth offensive against the work of Special Counsel Robert Mueller, the FBI, and the Justice Department itself, most recently by dropping charges against admitted liar Michael Flynn, briefly Trump's first national security advisor.
To make sure that the IC doesn’t challenge his wishes and does his bidding, Trump has moved to put his own political operatives in charge at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, or ODNI, created as part of an intelligence reorganization scheme after 9/11. The effort began in February when Trump named U.S. ambassador to Germany Richard Grenell as acting DNI. A highly partisan, sharp-elbowed politico and spokesman for former National Security Advisor John Bolton, he harbors far-right views and is a Trump loyalist, as well as an acolyte of former Trump aide Steve Bannon. On arriving in Bonn as ambassador, Grenell soon endorsed the rise of Europe’s anti-establishment ultra-right in an interview with Bannon’s Breitbart News.
To bolster Grenell, the administration has called on another ultra-right crusader, Kash Patel. He has served as Republican Congressman Devin Nunes’s aide in the campaign to discredit the Russia investigation and reportedly acted as a White House backchannel to Ukraine during the effort to stir up an inquiry in Kiev aimed at tarring former Vice President Joe Biden.
Following that, the president re-named Congressman John Ratcliffe of Texas, one of the president’s most enthusiastic defenders during the debate over impeachment, to serve as Grenell’s permanent replacement at ODNI. In 2019, Trump first floated Ratcliffe’s name for the post, but it was shot down days later, thanks to opposition from even Republican members of Congress, not to speak of intelligence professionals and various pundits. Now, he’s back, awaiting likely confirmation.
It remains to be seen whether the Grenell-Ratcliffe tag-team, combined with Trump’s three-year campaign to disparage the intelligence community and intimidate its functionaries, has softened them up enough for the administration’s push to finger China and its labs for creating and spreading Covid-19.
The Wuhan Lab Lies
As is often the case, that campaign began rather quietly and unobtrusively in conservative and right-wing media outlets.
On January 24th, the right-wing Washington Times ran a story entitled “Coronavirus may have originated in a lab linked to China’s biowarfare program.” It, in turn, was playing off of a piece that had appeared in London’s Daily Mail the previous day. Written like a science-fiction thriller, that story drew nearly all its (unverified) information from a single source, an Israeli military intelligence China specialist. Soon, it moved from the Washington Times to other American right-wing outlets. Steve Bannon picked it up the next day on his podcast, “War Room: Pandemic,” calling the piece “amazing.” A few days later, the unreliable, gossipy website ZeroHedge ran a (later much-debunked) piece saying that a Chinese scientist bioengineered the virus, purporting even to name the scientist.
A couple of weeks later, Fox News weighed in, laughably citing a Dean Koontz novel, The Eyes of Darkness, about “a Chinese military lab that creates a new virus to potentially use as a biological weapon during wartime.” The day after that, Senator Tom Cotton -- appearing on Fox, of course -- agreed that China might indeed have created the virus. Then the idea began to go... well, viral. (Soon Cotton was even tweeting that Beijing might possibly have deliberately released the virus.) By late February, the right’s loudest voice, Rush Limbaugh, was on the case, claiming that the virus “is probably a ChiCom laboratory experiment that is in the process of being weaponized.” (A vivid account of how this conspiracy theory spread can be found at the Global Disinformation Index.)
Starting in March, even as they were dismissing the seriousness of Covid-19, both Trump and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo repeatedly insisted on referring to it as the “China virus” or the “Wuhan virus,” ignoring criticism that terminology like that was both racist and inflammatory. In late March, Pompeo even managed to scuttle a communiqué from America’s allies in the Group of Seven, or G7, by demanding that they agree to use the term “Wuhan virus.” It didn’t take the president long to start threatening retaliatory action against China for its alleged role in spreading Covid-19, while he began comparing the pandemic to the 1941 Japanese sneak attack on Pearl Harbor.
And all of that was but a prelude to the White House ramping up of pressure on the CIA and the rest of the intelligence community to prove that the virus had indeed emerged, whether by design or accident, from either the Wuhan Institute of Virology or the Wuhan Center for Disease Control, a branch of the Chinese Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. An April 30th article in the New York Times broke the story that administration officials “have pushed American spy agencies to hunt for evidence to support an unsubstantiated theory that a government laboratory in Wuhan, China, was the origin of the coronavirus outbreak,” and that Grenell had made it a “priority.”
Both Trump and Pompeo would, in the meantime, repeatedly assert that they had seen actual “evidence” that the virus had indeed come from a Chinese lab, though Trump pretended that the information was so secret he couldn’t say anything more about it. “I can’t tell you that,” he said. “I’m not allowed to tell you that.” Asked during an appearance on ABC’s This Week if the virus had popped out of a lab in Wuhan, Pompeo answered: “There is enormous evidence that that’s where this began.”
On April 30th, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence issued a terse statement, saying that so far it had concluded Covid-19 is “not manmade or genetically modified,” but that they were looking into whether or not it was “the result of an accident at a laboratory in Wuhan.” There is, however, no evidence of such an accident, nor did the ODNI cite any.
A Finger on the Scale
The run-up to the invasion of Iraq in 2002-2003 should be on all our minds today. Then, top officials simply repeated again and again that they believed both Saddam Hussein’s nonexistent ties to al-Qaeda and his nonexistent active nuclear, chemical, and bioweapon programs were realities and assigned intelligence community collectors and analysts to look into them (while paying no attention to their conclusions). Now, Trump and his people are similarly putting their fat fingers on the scale of reality, while making it clear to hopefully intimidated intelligence professionals just what conclusions they want to hear.
Because those professionals know that their careers, salaries, and pensions depend on the continued favor of the politicians who pay them, there is, of course, a tremendous incentive to go along with such demands, shade what IC officials call the “estimate” in the direction the White House wants, or at least keep their mouths shut. That is exactly what happened in 2002 and, given that Grenell, Patel, and Ratcliffe are essentially Trump toadies, the IC officials lower on the totem pole have to be grimly aware of what their latest bosses expect from them.
There was near-instant pushback from scientists, intelligence officials, and China experts about the Trump-Pompeo campaign to finger the Wuhan lab. Dr. Anthony Fauci, the preeminent American scientist and Covid-19 expert, promptly shot it down, saying that the virus had “evolved in nature and then jumped species.” That’s because actual scientists, who study the genome of the virus and its mutations, unanimously agree that it was not generated in a lab.
Among America’s allies -- Australia, Britain, Canada, and New Zealand -- in what’s called the Five Eyes group, there was an unambiguous conclusion that the virus had been a “naturally occurring” one and had mutated in the course of “human and animal interaction.” Australia, in particular, rejected what appeared to be a fake-intelligence dossier about the Wuhan lab, while German officials in an internal document ridiculed the lab rumors as “a calculated attempt to distract” attention from the Trump administration’s own inept handling of the virus.
Finally, according to Bloomberg News, those studying the issue inside the intelligence community now say that suspicions it emerged from a lab are “largely circumstantial since the U.S. has very little information from the ground to back up the lab-escape theory or any other.” In the end, however, that doesn’t mean top IC officials beholden to the White House won’t tailor their conclusions to fit the Trump-Pompeo narrative.
John McLaughlin, who served as deputy director and then acting director of the CIA during the Bush administration, believes that we are indeed seeing a replay of what happened in Iraq nearly two decades ago. “What it reminds me of is the dispute between the CIA and parts of the Bush administration over whether there was an operational relationship between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda,” he said. “They kept asking the CIA, and we kept coming back and saying, ‘You know, it's just not there.’”
Whether the tug-of-war between Trump, Pompeo, and the IC is just another passing battle in a more than three-year-old war between the president and the “Deep State” or whether it’s something that could lead to a serious crisis between Washington and Beijing remains to be seen. Ironically enough, in January and February of this year, the IC provided President Trump with more than a dozen clear warnings about the dangers to the United States and national security posed by the coronavirus, following clarion calls from China and the World Health Organization that what was happening in Wuhan could spread worldwide -- warnings that Trump either failed to notice, disregarded, or downplayed through March.
Were Donald Trump not so predisposed to see the intelligence community as his enemy, he might have paid more attention back then. Had he done so, there would undoubtedly be many less dead Americans right now and he wouldn’t have had to spend his time in his own lab concocting what might be thought of as batshit excuses for his dereliction of duty.
By the time this affair is over, the invasion of Iraq could look like the good old days.
Bob Dreyfuss, an investigative journalist and TomDispatch regular, is a contributing editor at the Nation and has written for Rolling Stone, Mother Jones, the American Prospect, the New Republic, and many other magazines. He is the author of Devil’s Game: How the United States Helped Unleash Fundamentalist Islam.
Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Books, John Feffer’s new dystopian novel (the second in the Splinterlands series) Frostlands, Beverly Gologorsky's novel Every Body Has a Story, and Tom Engelhardt's A Nation Unmade by War, as well as Alfred McCoy's In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power and John Dower's The Violent American Century: War and Terror Since World War II.
Copyright 2020 Bob Dreyfuss
Immediately after the 2018 midterm elections, amid chaos and confusion over the results in Florida, President Donald Trump repeatedly claimed on Twitter that Democrats were engaging in some sort of illegal election scheme. He said that he was sending lawyers "to expose the FRAUD!" and that votes were being "found" for Democrats by Broward County officials to "falsify a victory." Then-Gov. Rick Scott, who was running in the Senate election, agreed and called for an investigation into what Trump called a "big corruption scandal."
After a year and a half of investigation, according to Politico, investigators in Florida have conclusively put the president's conspiracy theories to bed.
"Neither Trump’s unnamed 'lawyers' nor the Florida Department of Law Enforcement found evidence of a 'big corruption scandal,'" reported Marc Caputo. "The state took more than 17 months to wrap up its investigation Wednesday, and found none of the wrongdoing alleged by Trump and Scott."
The election in Broward County was plagued by mismanagement that ended the career of county supervisor Brenda Snipes, but investigators found zero evidence of fraudulent voting. Late breaking ballots were disproportionately Democratic, but, as University of Florida political science professor Michael McDonald noted, that is not unusual — this pattern occurs in many states and is known as the "blue shift."
"Trump’s corruption conspiracy in Florida collapsed as he sought to discredit vote-by-mail efforts in two other battleground states, Michigan and Nevada, with incendiary and false rhetoric," continued the report. "As Trump tweeted falsities about vote-by-mail in those states, the Florida GOP sent a fundraising email urging donors to 'Stop Voter Fraud.'"
You can read more here.
The debate over how to respond to the coronavirus pandemic is now turning some Americans away from the Republican Party, according to The State.
In South Carolina, a self-described "moderate Republican" who has given campaign donations to both sides said he's not interested in reelecting Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC).
“I was a big supporter of Lindsey, especially back in the ‘90s,” said Wallace Lightsey. “I helped raise money for him and I really liked him. I thought he was very bright, very articulate and seemed to be pretty practical.”
Another concern is President Donald Trump and how he's forced Graham to be a different kind of senator.
“As far as Lindsey’s concerned, with me, it’s all about Trump and Lindsey’s over-the-top support of Trump. I probably wouldn’t have done anything different if he’d just stayed quiet, but his very vocal support of Trump … that really turned me off," said Lightsey.
A review of Graham's campaign finance data shows Lightsey is one of at least 24 Graham supporters who have flipped to support Democratic challenger Jaime Harrison. The two-dozen supporters aren't going to remake an election nor will Graham miss the $68,000 in donations from the group, but if those donors are splitting off from Graham it could be part of a larger exodus.
“It’s 24 people,” said Furman University political scientist Danielle Vinson. “But if there are 24 people who are willing to put their money where their mouth is, there are going to be others who are going to show up and vote, and vote where their concerns are."
Graham likely doesn't care, however, he's managed to pick up a lot of Trump supporters to stand at his side. While Graham once aligned himself with the likes of the late Sen. John McCain (R-AZ), being friends with Trump has better electoral benefits. Losing moderate Republicans may be a problem, but when Graham's new friend, President Donald Trump, mobilizes his voters, Graham will win them over by 74 percent. That wasn't the case when Graham was attacking Trump. The quick turn has prompted some to criticize Graham as a politician who will simply "flop with the political winds."
“Given increasing polarization, it’s definitely unusual to see people switching parties, particularly big donors,” said Sheila Krumholz, executive director of the Center for Responsive Politics.
“There are not a lot of good examples of this phenomenon,” she said, “which is why it’s so striking.”
Lightsey also isn't alone in abandoning Graham. One of his biggest supporters, Richard Wilkerson, the former chairman and president of Michelin’s South Carolina-based operations, announced in April he's leaving Graham too.
“I am confident that as our next U.S. Senator, he will be a tireless advocate for creating well-paying jobs, improving our state’s health care system, and training the next generation for the jobs of tomorrow,” Wilkerson said of Harrison. “Jaime is the perfect candidate to bring together South Carolinians from all walks of life.”
Read the full report of the Graham supporters flipping at The State.
On Thursday, KVUE reported that William "Roddie" Bryan Jr., the man who allegedly filmed the killing of Ahmaud Arbery in Georgia, has been arrested on charges of felony murder and criminal attempt to commit false imprisonment.
Bryan has been booked into the Glynn County Jail, according to the report. Authorities have not yet released any additional details on the matter.
"Felony murder" is a charge, under the laws of several states, whereby anyone who assists in the commission of a dangerous crime that leads to death can be held responsible for murder, even if they didn't literally cause the death.
Arbery's shooting death at the hands of Greg and Travis McMichael has sparked nationwide outrage.
At his speech at the plant in Ypsilanti, Michigan on Thursday, President Donald Trump did not wear a mask much of the time, despite the plant's rules requiring it, and told reporters it was their own fault he wasn't.
When the Republicans needed a law professor to stand with them against the impeachment of Donald Trump, they employed Jonathan Turley to explain that the Democrats hadn't met the burden to vote to impeach. There was a score of law professors who disagreed and had the citations to prove it.
Since then, Turley has come in conflict with other legal experts and scholars when it comes to his writing.
According to former ethics czar Walter Shaub, five lawyers have come forward to say that their words were "misrepresented" in his writing.
"At some point, he may have to admit to himself that he's the problem," said Shaub.
He also noted that Turley told him that he had added one of Shaub's tweets to his blog when it was actually a quote from someone who summarized his tweet incorrectly.
Shaub said that he doesn't expect a retraction or an apology to the lawyers that have been mischaracterized.
"We cannot continue to allow tens of millions of Americans to lose their jobs, income, and health insurance during this horrific pandemic," said Sen. Bernie Sanders, one of the bill's lead sponsors.
Sens. Bernie Sanders, Mark Warner, Doug Jones, and Richard Blumenthal on Thursday unveiled legislation aimed at stemming coronavirus-induced mass layoffs in the United States by guaranteeing paychecks and healthcare benefits to laid-off and furloughed workers for the rest of 2020.
The Paycheck Security Act—introduced with support from senators across the ideological spectrum of the Democratic caucus, and with the notable backing of Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.)—would massively expand the existing Employee Retention Tax Credit to cover wages, salaries, and benefits for laid-off or furloughed workers up to $90,000 per year.
The tax credits would be refundable and advanceable, meaning employers would not have to wait to file payroll taxes to receive the payment.
"The most important thing we can do for workers and our economy is keep as many people as possible connected to their jobs, paychecks, and healthcare."
—Sara Nelson, Association of Flight Attendants
According to a summary (pdf) of the bill released by Sanders' office, the payroll credit would be available to "employers who have experienced at least a 15 percent drop in gross receipts compared to the same quarter in 2019." The legislation would also provide businesses with a refundable tax credit to cover operating costs like rent, utilities, and maintenance.
"We cannot continue to allow tens of millions of Americans to lose their jobs, income, and health insurance during this horrific pandemic," Sanders said in a statement. "In order to avoid another Great Depression, Congress must act boldly and aggressively to ensure that every American worker receives their paycheck and health insurance until this crisis is over."
It's unclear whether the legislation can gain enough support to pass the Republican-controlled Senate, but the idea of having the federal government cover company payrolls has won the backing of Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) and Cory Gardner (R-Colo.).
The Paycheck Security Act has been endorsed by economists, advocacy groups, and labor leaders, including AFL-CIO president Richard Trumka and Association of Flight Attendants president Sara Nelson.
"The most important thing we can do for workers and our economy is keep as many people as possible connected to their jobs, paychecks, and healthcare," Nelson said in a statement. "The best way to do that is to make it easy for employers to keep payroll running. That's what we did for aviation workers in the CARES Act, and it's what the Paycheck Security Act would accomplish for tens of millions more workers."
The Senate bill comes just days after Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) on Tuesday introduced the Paycheck Recovery Act in the House with 93 original co-sponsors, including a number of moderates. Instead of leveraging the Employee Retention Tax Credit, Jayapal's bill would provide businesses with direct grants through the IRS to cover the wages and benefits of laid-off and furloughed workers up to 90,000 per year.
"Mass unemployment is a policy choice, and we must choose differently by passing an urgent proposal that matches the scale of this crisis while delivering certainty and direct relief to workers, businesses of all sizes, and the economy," Jayapal said in a statement. "The Paycheck Recovery Act will end mass unemployment, put workers back on their paychecks and health care and keep businesses from closing permanently."
Jayapal fought hard for the inclusion of her paycheck guarantee proposal in HEROES Act, which passed the House last week, but was ultimately rebuffed by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.). Jayapal joined several moderate House Democrats in voting against the HEROES Act in part because she said the bill would not do nearly enough to curb mass unemployment.
As The Intercept's Ryan Grim reported Tuesday, the significant support Jayapal's paycheck guarantee plan has garnered from moderate Democrats in swing districts "represents a new threat to House Democratic leadership's domination of the caucus."
"For years, Pelosi has insisted that if it were up to her, the party would go further left than it does, but that the imperatives of reelection require moderating legislation for the members she calls 'majority makers,'" Grim wrote. "But if those majority makers get out ahead of Pelosi, that rationale would evaporate, and the dictates of making and keeping a majority would militate in their direction."
"The politics of fighting on behalf of jobs is an obvious winner," Grim added.
Facebook chief Mark Zuckerberg said Thursday remote work is here to stay, and that half of the social network's staff could be doing jobs from afar within a decade.
Zuckerberg devoted a live-streamed "town hall' meeting with employees to how a remote-work trend compelled by the pandemic is being embraced by employees without affecting productivity.
He outlined steps Facebook will take to adapt operations to remote work for the long-term, saying it is quite possible that about half of the company's employees could doing their jobs that way within 10 years.
"I think we're going to be the most forward-leaning company on remote work, at our scale for sure," Zuckerberg said.
"But, we're going to do this in a way that is measured and thoughtful and responsible and in phases over time."
Initial steps will include "aggressively" hiring remotely instead of requiring face-to-face interviews with candidates.
"Most of us are working remotely at this point, so it doesn't make sense for us to bring people into offices that a lot of them aren't going to be able to go into anyway," Zuckerberg said.
About 95 percent of Facebook employees work remotely due to pandemic concerns, and the company has told them they can continue to do their jobs that way through next year if desired.
Shifting aggressively to remote work brings opportunity to hire talented candidates who don't live near cities where Facebook has offices, sparing them commutes, congestion and the high living costs of tech-company towns.
Zuckerberg said he wanted to protect Facebook workplace culture shaped on Silicon Valley campuses, known for playful, creative atmospheres, gourmet meals and other fun perks.
"This is fundamentally about changing our culture and the way that we are all going to work longterm," Zuckerberg said.
"I am optimistic, but I want to make sure that we move forward a measured way."
The move by Facebook follows an announcement from Silicon Valley rival Twitter, which recently announced that most of its workforce may continue telework indefinitely.
Some tech firms have said they don't expect to bring most employees back to the office before 2021.
Earlier Thursday, Facebook said it was bulking up the Workplace version of its social network that helps employees get their jobs done remotely.
Workplace, which now has some five million paying users, is taking advantage of innovations in other parts of Facebook, adding virtual "rooms" where as many as 50 people can drop in for video chats and integrating services from its Portal smart screens and Oculus virtual reality.
© 2020 AFP
There's no meaningful link between an athlete having a Therapeutic Use Exemption (TUE) and winning an Olympic medal, a study unveiled Thursday by the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) found.
US tennis stars Serena and Venus Williams and reigning Olympic and world all-around gymnastics champion Simone Biles are among athletes who have used TUEs, special permission to take otherwise banned substances for medical needs.
Their WADA medical data, including use of TUEs, was revealed publicly by a hacker in 2016.
The WADA study examined athletes with TUEs at the 2012 London and 2016 Rio Summer Olympics and the 2010 Vancouver, 2014 Sochi and 2018 Pyeongchang Winter Olympics to see if athletes with TUEs won more medals than those without.
"The number of athletes competing with valid TUEs (in individual competition) at the selected Games was less than 1%," said WADA medical director Dr. Alan Vernec said.
"The analysis suggests there's no meaningful association between competing with a TUE and the likelihood of winning a medal.
"The results of this study provide objective data to dispel some of the misunderstandings and misgivings surrounding TUEs."
Biles said in 2016 that she had been taking medicine since childhood for Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder.
Venus Williams defended her use of TUEs in 2018, saying she regularly used them but "I am never, ever going to take an advantage over someone else. That is not who I am."
Athletes are given TUEs only after a review process and evaluation by a physicians panel on the medical relevance of the request. WADA and other anti-doping organizations then conduct further evaluation.
"The TUE Program is a necessary part of sport, allowing athletes with legitimate medical conditions to compete on a level playing field," Vernec said.
"It has overwhelming acceptance from athletes, physicians and anti-doping stakeholders and there is a stringent process in place to avoid abuse of the system."
Researchers calculated risk ratios for the probability of winning a medal with and without TUEs and adjusted for the fact athletes from nations with greater resources might produce better performances due to other factors.
There were 181 TUE users among 20,139 athletes who won 21 of 2,062 medals awarded, 0.9% in all. The ratio for winning a medal with a TUE was 1.13 compared to a 1.07 adjusted risk ratio.
© 2020 AFP
Editor’s note: Muslims all over the world are celebrating Eid al-Fitr, one of the religion’s principal festivals. In August, Muslims will celebrate Eid al-Adha. Ken Chitwood, a scholar of global Islam, explains the two Islamic festivals.
Eid literally means a “festival” or “feast” in Arabic. There are two major eids in the Islamic calendar per year – Eid al-Fitr earlier in the year and Eid al-Adha later.
Eid al-Fitr is a three-day-long festival and is known as the “Lesser” or “Smaller Eid” when compared to Eid al-Adha, which is four-days-long and is known as the “Greater Eid.”
The two Eids recognize, celebrate and recall two distinct events that are significant to the story of Islam.
Eid al-Fitr means “the feast of breaking the fast.” The fast, in this instance, is Ramadan, which recalls the revealing of the Quran to Prophet Muhammad and requires Muslims to fast from sunrise to sundown for a month.
Eid al-Fitr features two to three days of celebrations that include special morning prayers. People greet each other with “Eid Mubarak,” meaning “Blessed Eid” and with formal embraces. Sweet dishes are prepared at home and gifts are given to children and to those in need. In addition, Muslims are encouraged to forgive and seek forgiveness. Practices vary from country to country.
In many countries with large Muslim populations, Eid al-Fitr is a national holiday. Schools, offices and businesses are closed so family, friends and neighbors can enjoy the celebrations together. In the U.S. and the U.K., Muslims may request to have the day off from school or work to travel or celebrate with family and friends.
In countries like Egypt and Pakistan, Muslims decorate their homes with lanterns, twinkling lights or flowers. Special food is prepared and friends and family are invited over to celebrate.
Ken Chitwood, CC BY
In places like Jordan, with its Muslim majority population, the days before Eid al-Fitr can see a rush at local malls and special “Ramadan markets” as people prepare to exchange gifts on Eid al-Fitr.
In Turkey and in places that were once part of the Ottoman-Turkish empire such as Bosnia and Herzegovina, Albania, Azerbaijan and the Caucasus, it is also known as the, “Lesser Bayram” or “festival” in Turkish.
The other festival, Eid al-Adha, is the “feast of the sacrifice.” It comes at the end of the Hajj, an annual pilgrimage by millions of Muslims to the holy city of Mecca in Saudi Arabia that is obligatory once in a lifetime, but only for those with means.
Eid al-Adha recalls the story of how God commanded Ibrahim to sacrifice his son Ismail as a test of faith. The story, as narrated in the Quran, describes Satan’s attempt to tempt Ibrahim so he would disobey God’s command. Ibrahim, however, remains unmoved and informs Ismail, who is willing to be sacrificed.
But, just as Ibrahim attempts to kill his son, God intervenes and a ram is sacrificed in place of Ismail. During Eid al-Adha, Muslims slaughter an animal to remember Ibrahim’s sacrifice and remind themselves of the need to submit to the will of God.
Eid al-Fitr is celebrated on the first day of the 10th month in the Islamic calendar.
Eid al-Adha is celebrated on the 10th day of the final month in the Islamic calendar.
The Islamic calendar is a lunar calendar, and dates are calculated based on lunar phases. Since the Islamic calendar year is shorter than the solar Gregorian calendar year by 10 to 12 days, the dates for Ramadan and Eid on the Gregorian calendar can vary year by year.
Eid al-Fitr, as it follows the fasting of Ramadan, is also seen as a spiritual celebration of Allah’s provision of strength and endurance.
Amid the reflection and rejoicing, Eid al-Fitr is a time for charity, known as Zakat al-Fitr. Eid is meant to be a time of joy and blessing for the entire Muslim community and a time for distributing one’s wealth.
Charity to the poor is a highly emphasized value in Islam. The Quran says,
“Believe in Allah and his messenger, and give charity out of the (substance) that Allah has made you heirs of. For those of you who believe and give charity – for them is a great reward.”
This piece incorporates materials from an article first published on Aug. 28, 2017.
Ken Chitwood, Lecturer, Concordia College New York | Journalist-fellow, USC Center for Religion and Civic Culture, Concordia College New York
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
While Michigan leaders begged President Donald Trump to wear a mask to protect their state and the workers at the Ford plant, Trump said he didn't want to because it would give the press too much satisfaction.
Others at Ford were clad in masks:
%20Here is Trump holding a plastic face mask, which he also chose not to wear:
When asked why he didn't put the mask on and comply with the rules, Trump blamed the media
"I didn't want to give the press the pleasure of seeing it," the president said.
"I was given a choice, and had one on in the area [Ford] preferred it," he said.
Veteran journalist Bob Woodword wrote in his book Fear that the president also wears glasses, but refuses to wear them in public, despite needing them to read.
See the comments below:
On Thursday, ABC news reported that the shooting at the Naval Air Station in Corpus Christi that wounded a guard and resulted in the death of the shooter was terrorism-related, according to the FBI.
If true, this marks the second terrorist attack on a naval station in six months — although the FBI has not yet clarified what evidence supports that it was terrorism, or whether the two incidents are linked.
The FBI also has warned that a second person-of-interest in the shooting may still be at large.
"The shooting unfolded at about 6:15 a.m. local time when the suspect sped through a gate, activating vehicle barriers which stopped the car, a defense official told ABC News," said the report. "The driver then got out of the car and began shooting, before being 'neutralized,' the defense official said."
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