in Trump’s battle with the intelligence community

PREVIOUS Covid News thread HERE, covering April 1 thru 14.

Feds turn into cyberfirefighters and hose down the web shell bonfire raging on hundreds of unpatched Exchange servers.

By Chris Duckett @ zdnet.com, April 14

[....] "Today's court-authorized removal of the malicious web shells demonstrates the department's commitment to disrupt hacking activity using all of our legal tools, not just prosecutions," Assistant Attorney General for national security John C. Demers said [....]

It's both personal and objective - Murdoch set out to destroy people and societies, including ours

the political situation outlined here should be of interest for all "blue cities" with rising crime rates and policing issues

Seth Aaron Pendley was arrested on Thursday and charged with plotting to blow up an Amazon data center in Virginia, prosecutors said.

By Michael Levenson @ NYTimes.com, April 10

A Texas man who boasted that he was at the United States Capitol when a pro-Trump mob stormed the building in January has been charged with plotting to blow up an Amazon data center in Virginia, the Justice Department said on Friday.

The man, Seth Aaron Pendley, 28, of Wichita Falls, was arrested on Thursday after he took what he believed were explosive devices from a bomb supplier but were in fact inert objects provided by an undercover F.B.I. agent in Fort Worth, prosecutors said.

He was charged with a malicious attempt to destroy a building with an explosive, Prerak Shah, the acting U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Texas, said in a statement. If convicted, Mr. Pendley faces 20 years in prison. Federal officials said they had begun investigating the plot after a concerned citizen contacted the F.B.I. on Jan. 8 about alarming statements posted on MyMilitia.com, a forum dedicated to organizing militia groups.

A user with the screen name Dionysus wrote that he was planning to “conduct a little experiment” that he said would “draw a lot of heat” and could be “dangerous,” prosecutors said. According to the statement, when another user asked what Dionysus wanted, he responded, “death.” A confidential source provided the F.B.I. with the user’s email address, which was registered to Mr. Pendley, prosecutors said.

“We are indebted to the concerned citizen who came forward to report the defendant’s alarming online rhetoric,” Mr. Shah said in the statement. “In flagging his posts to the F.B.I., this individual may have saved the lives of a number of tech workers [....]

New research has identified unusual antibodies that appear to have caused, in rare cases, serious and sometimes fatal blood clots in people who received the Covid vaccine made by AstraZeneca.

Exactly why the rare reactions to the vaccine occurred is still a mystery.

Scientific teams from Germany and Norway found that people who developed the clots after vaccination had produced antibodies that activated their platelets, a blood component involved in clotting. The new reports add extensive details to what the researchers have already stated publicly about the blood disorder.

Younger people appear more susceptible than older ones, but researchers say no pre-existing health conditions are known to predispose people to the rare reaction. That is worrisome, they say, because there is no way to tell if an individual is at high risk.

@ DemocracyCorps.com (Stan Greenberg), March 26

[....] Democrats have only a 2-point lead in party identification and 43 percent still approve of his behavior — unchanged after the insurrection. Fully 58 percent are Trump Loyalists who strongly approve of Trump and another 12 percent Trump-aligned who “somewhat approve” of him but are very conservative or Evangelical

Trump’s base is angry about government restrictions on their freedom and believe they are fighting to save the “American way of life” from cancel culture and Black Lives Matter’s violent attacks on police and white people.

We conducted focus groups in March with Trump Loyalists in Georgia and Wisconsin and Trump-aligned, non-Trump conservatives and moderates in suburban and rural Georgia, Ohio, and Wisconsin. It took a long time to recruit these groups because Trump voters seemed particularly distrustful of outsiders right now, wary of being victimized, and avoided revealing their true position until in a Zoom room with all Trump voters — then, they let it all out. 

And here are the conclusions that emerged from this new research:

• The Trump loyalists and Trump-aligned were angry, but also despondent, feeling powerless and uncertain they will become more involved in politics;

• Trump’s base saw Biden, as a white man, as not threatening, controlled by others, unlike Obama who represented everything Tea Party-Republicans were determined to fight;

• Even Trump’s base is curious about the extent to which they benefit from the American Rescue Plan (ARP) and Biden’s signature program, compared to Obamacare that they viewed as a new entitlement for Blacks and immigrants that must be stopped;

• The Trump loyalists and the Trump aligned are animated about government taking away their freedom and a cancel culture that leaves no place for white Americans and the fear they’re losing “their” country to non-whites;

• They were angered most of all by Black Lives Matter (BLM) and Antifa that were responsible for a full year of violence in Democratic cities that put white people on the defensive – and was ignored by the media; [....]

The company’s decisive victory deals a crushing blow to organized labor, which had hoped the time was ripe to start making inroads.

Current headline story by Karen Weise & Michael Corkery @ NYTimes.com, April 9 Updated 4:03 p.m. ET

Amazon workers at a giant warehouse in Alabama voted decisively against forming a union on Friday, squashing the most significant labor drive in the internet giant’s history and dealing a crushing blow to organizers, Democrats and their allies when conditions have appeared ripe for unions to make advances.

Workers cast 1,798 votes against a union, giving Amazon enough to emphatically defeat the effort. Ballots in favor of a union trailed at 738, fewer than 30 percent of the votes tallied, according to federal officials.

The lopsided outcome at the 6,000-person warehouse in Bessemer, Ala., came even as the pandemic’s effect on the economy and the election of a pro-labor president had made the country more aware of the plight of essential workers.

Amazon, which has repeatedly quashed labor activism, had appeared vulnerable as it faced increasing scrutiny in Washington and around the world for its market power and influence. President Biden signaled support for the union effort, as did Senator Bernie Sanders, the Vermont independent. The pandemic, which drove millions of people to shop online, also raised questions about Amazon’s ability to keep those employees safe [....]