End US War Machine

George Soros gave Ivanka's husband's business a $250 million credit line in 2015 per WSJ. Soros is also an investor in Jared's business.

Wednesday, October 1, 2025

Team Trump grossly intervened in upcoming NY City Mayor election to help Democrat Andrew Cuomo win, persuaded Eric Adams to drop his re-election bid-NY Times, 9/20/2025

At September’s meeting Team Trump wanted Mr. Adams to drop his re-election bid, to help clear the field for Andrew Cuomo.”

9/20/2025, What the Mayor Got Away With Has Already Changed America, New York Times,

There are 10 bathrooms in the connected penthouses atop the Plaza hotel, and an 82-foot-long terrace that looks north over Central Park from 21 floors up.

A winding staircase descends from the upper floor to a level filled with mirrors and skylights and a pair of kitchens. An in-unit elevator drops down to

three of the triplex’s seven bedrooms. Presiding over all this on an evening in September 2020 are Emma Duo Liu, a former Miss China, and her husband, a billionaire who first made his money in a Beijing nightclub and movie theaters.

The name he’s using on this night is

Hui Qin,

though he has frequently operated under an alias, given to him by a Chinese government official.

Mr. Qin and Ms. Liu are hosting a 60th birthday celebration for Eric Adams. He is Brooklyn’s borough president, but everyone has higher aspirations for him. The cake, which is in the shape of a box of Cohiba cigars, prominently bears the word “mayor.”

Many of the 70 or so guests stay out on the giant terrace smoking actual cigars and snapping selfies. They include

Eric Ulrich,

who will later be indicted on bribery charges as Mr. Adams’s buildings commissioner,

and Winnie Greco,

who will come under intense scrutiny for her ties to the Chinese government, her luxe fund-raisers that allegedly included fake donors, and her attempt to give a City Hall reporter a wad of cash stuffed into a sour cream and onion potato chip bag.

As for Mr. Qin, he went on to serve seven months in a U.S. prison for immigration fraud and illegal campaign donations, including to Mr. Adams, and then was forced to leave the United States.

In all, 27 people in Eric Adams’s orbit donors, allies, top aides–

have been indicted since that birthday party.

Then there’s No. 28: the mayor himself.

The indictment, unsealed by the U.S. attorney’s office for the Southern District of New York on Sept. 26, 2024, accused Mr. Adams of defrauding the city, accepting illicit donations and taking bribes from the Turkish government.

It was a startling development. But those charges, which included accusations that Mr. Adams accepted upgraded flights and hotel suites in return for municipal favors, are just a fraction of the corruption that is alleged to have pervaded the Adams administration, and of the questionable deals that prosecutors were investigating.

A second U.S. attorney’s office, in the Eastern District of New York, was already investigating a different covert influence campaign — undertaken not by Turkey but by China. National security and public integrity prosecutors from that office were looking into Ms. Greco. Local news outlets such as The City uncovered evidence of illicit contributions on a much greater scale than anything in the Southern District’s indictment.

The purported corruption ran from the grand scale of global politics to the most parochial, penny-ante payoffs.

Ingrid Lewis-Martin,

a former top aide whom Mr. Adams describes as his “sister,” was indicted on money laundering and bribery charges for allegedly calling in favors in exchange for a bit part in an MGM+ streaming show and cash that her son used to buy a new Porsche.

And it swept up almost every department in Mr. Adams’s administration especially, and most important, the New York Police Department.

The culture of impunity described in dozens of lawsuits, indictments and whistle-blower complaints was so widespread that one of the mayor’s own former police commissioners sued him for enforcing what the commissioner characterized as

a culture of “lawlessness.”

The mayor has not been convicted of any crime. He has said that he “never violated my role as the mayor” and that his only mistake was placing his trust in people who disappointed him. But it’s hard to deny that Mr. Adams’s tenure has become an object lesson in how

corruption left unchecked can build on itself.

The implications extend far beyond the five boroughs of New York City. They ripple through law enforcement offices and legislatures and courthouses across the nation, all the way up to the highest office in the land.

Even if Mr. Adams broke no laws, he has been the flywheel for a corrupt machine. Each turn of the gears moves us further from the ideal of public officials who observe the rule of law.

The most wrenching turn of all was how

the Trump administration ordered prosecutors to make the case against Mr. Adams disappear.

Over the past few decades, courts and legislators have made it harder to fight dirty money and dirty deals. Dropping the case against Mr. Adams advanced that process significantly. A great many observers say it was designed to soften New York City up for President Trump’s sweeping deportation raids and to turn the mayor into a puppet on Mr. Trump’s string. That would mean that in that one deal, Mr. Trump’s corruption enabled Mr. Adams’s and Mr. Adams’s corruption enabled Mr. Trump’s.

In response to detailed questions, Mr. Adams’s press secretary told me that while critics “have tried to paint his relationship with the federal government as anything other than beneficial to New Yorkers, the fact is there is absolutely no truth or evidence to support that claim.” His good relationship with the president, she said, helps the city in many ways.

But the Adams deal didn’t just insulate the mayor. It also cracked the Justice Department’s public integrity section and

undermined the proudly independent Southern District. It sent a clear signal to prosecutors everywhere that

the Department of Justice won’t pursue these cases anymore,

unless someone gets on Mr. Trump’s bad side.

And it functionally killed Mr. Adams’s credibility, and his chances at a second term, despite a record that in many other ways — [alleged] fewer shootings, cleaner streets, more housing — has been solid. So lately there’s been talk of another possible deal, this time for Mr. Adams to drop out of the mayor’s race

and join Mr. Trump’s administration.

When the original deal came to light, I worried it might be part of a larger push to normalize corruption. Seven months later, there is no longer any reason to doubt that it was. It was Chapter 1 in a new playbook in Washington. Chapter 2 has already led to the Trump family’s pocketing billions of dollars.

Chapter 3 could be the real smash and grab.

Politics is grimy. Politics is transactional. Politics is whom you know. And for too long, sanctimonious prosecutors tried to criminalize this kind of ordinary give-and-take — all while generating a demand for their $2,000-per-hour services when they became white-collar defense lawyers. So goes an argument that’s been made by more than one ally of the president. Besides, they say, if you look hard enough into any politician’s past, you can probably find some ticky-tack violation of campaign finance rules or civil service procedures. Honking your horn is illegal in this town, too.

You can hear that logic loud and clear from people in Mr. Adams’s circle. On her lawyer’s radio show, Ms. Lewis-Martin, the mayor’s “sister,” said, “We have not done anything illegal to the magnitude or scale that requires the federal government and the D.A.’s office to investigate us.”

Which is a far cry from saying they did nothing illegal….

The Trump administration is eagerly using these arguments to defend itself and its allies. Under past presidents, “EVERY TIME DOJ has pursued expansive theories of public corruption, the Department has been rebuked by the Supreme Court,” Attorney General Pam Bondi’s chief of staff, Chad Mizelle, posted on X. “The case against Mayor Adams was just one in a long history of past DOJ actions that represent grave errors of judgment.” And of course, by advancing the idea that the mayor was the victim of lawfare, Mr. Trump’s supporters advance the idea that the president was, too.

In the summer of 2021, federal investigators began looking into Mr. Adams’s foreign connections.

They examined ties to the governments of

Qatar, Israel, South Korea, Uzbekistan and China — and Turkey,

where they quickly found what they considered to be evidence not just of influence peddling but

also of a criminal conspiracy.

When the charges against Mr. Adams were announced, however, some members of the legal community were underwhelmed. Flight upgrades in exchange for pressuring the Fire Department to waive an inspection of the Turkish Consulate? Was that the best the feds had on Mr. Adams? And whatever Mr. Adams was accused of, he did it before he was elected mayor. How could that be an “official act”? Even within the Justice Department, there was serious debate. On the other hand, low-level city employees are prosecuted for pocket-change bribes, so why should the mayor get a free pass?

But travel perks were never the whole story. Prosecutors said in court papers that

Mr. Adams had accepted campaign donations that had been broken up into small denominations and

falsely attributed to other people to avoid local limits on contributions.

Those are known as straw donations, and they are

one of the few ways that you can still break federal campaign finance laws.

Another way is to knowingly take contributions from foreigners. Prosecutors allege that Mr. Adams did that, too.

It’s not just a matter of accounting. In total, Mr. Adams’s first mayoral campaign unlocked $10 million of New York’s exceptionally generous 8-to-1 program of public matching funds. If some of that was based on deceptive donations, that’s fraud. And $10 million could go a long way in

a race he won by just 7,197 votes.

There were strong indications that even more charges against Mr. Adams were coming. A few days after the mayor’s indictment, one of Mr. Adams’s aides was charged with

trying to get witnesses to lie to investigators and destroy evidence.

According to court papers, he said he did it with Mr. Adams’s full knowledge….

The friendship is the favor. And Eric Adams is always willing to make new friends.

On one of Mr. Adams’s upgraded trips to Istanbul, he is reported to have met with Sezgin Baran Korkmaz, a wealthy Turkish businessman. According to the indictment, during the meeting, Mr. Adams asked him for money, and he agreed to “contribute $50,000 or more” to the mayor’s campaign,

“believing that Adams might one day be the president.”

The big payment never arrived. Mr. Korkmaz was arrested and extradited to Utah on charges that he was part of a billion-dollar scam involving a biodiesel firm, a former C.I.A. director and a polygamist blood cult.

His trial date, however, came and went

without further notice on the federal docket. This summer, social media showed Mr. Korkmaz enjoying himself in New York City.

Mr. Korkmaz had been getting ready to testify against Mr. AdamsLos Angeles magazine reported, until Mr. Trump pulled the plug on the mayor’s prosecution. The wheel of corruption turns again.

However advanced Turkey’s persuasion program is, China’s is an entirely different class. It’s been especially active in New York City, where the Chinese diaspora is over 600,000 people strong and émigré politics are particularly intense. According to prosecutors, the Beijing government stalked a former Tiananmen Square protester who ran for Congress in Manhattan,

 steered millions of dollars to the family of an aide to Gov. Andrew Cuomo and Gov. Kathy Hochul and tricked a former New York Police Department officer into helping surveil enemies of the Chinese state.

Mr. Adams said in 2019 that during his years as Brooklyn borough president he made seven trips to China. At least three of them were with Winnie Greco, who has been by Mr. Adams’s side for more than a decade — as an adviser, a community liaison, a $196,000-per-year city employee — despite being connected to one scandal after another.

Many figures like this are in Mr. Adams’s orbit. What makes Ms. Greco different is her connections to Beijing and its network of so-called United Front cultural and charitable groups. She is reported to have consulted for a provincial association funded by the Chinese government and attended numerous Communist Party events and did work for an affiliate of a Chinese propaganda outfit.

During one of Mr. Adams’s trips with Ms. Greco, he handed the Chinese government a win by praising its controversial Belt and Road initiative in interviews with state-backed news agencies. On another, he met with Lu (Harry) Jianwang, who was later indicted on charges that he operated clandestine Chinese government police station in Lower Manhattan. When he became mayor, Mr. Adams skipped a reception with the Taiwanese president after the top Chinese diplomat in New York asked him to, in the name of “friendship.”

All the while, Ms. Greco acted as one of Mr. Adams’s most aggressive fund-raisers. Ms. Greco hosted a soiree at the 7,500-square-foot Long Island home of Lian Wu Shao, the operator of the New World Mall in Flushing. Caviar was passed; a D.J. kept the party going; lobster and $400 bottles of wine were served. The event brought in 231 donations. Each contribution was for $249 or $250 — right at the city’s upper limit for its generous matching funds. That meant the evening’s haul was $55,000, which the Adams campaign used to seek hundreds of thousands of dollars in public matching funds. Many names listed as contributors belonged to cashiers and delivery people at the mall. Three of those people told The City they had never given to Mr. Adams, suggesting the kind of arrangements that prosecutors have, in other cases, labeled illegal straw donations.

Ms. Greco maintains she is innocent. People around her keep getting indicted — charged with skimming more than a million dollars off a contract meant to help migrants in need, with buying a townhouse for a city official who was responsible for granting lucrative government contracts. Hui Qin was arrested after an incident involving an ax and was accused by his wife of strangling her. The F.B.I. raided Ms. Greco’s two homes in the Bronx and the New World Mall office where she ran her fund-raising operation.

Some members of the team working the Adams Turkey case — who requested anonymity out of fear of political retribution — told me they kept wondering when the Eastern District would charge Ms. Greco. If it had happened before Mr. Adams was indicted, it could have bolstered their case against the mayor. But despite what they considered to be a mountain of publicly available evidence, the charges never came.

Corruption is sometimes described as a victimless crime, just skimming from a bottomless pool of [defenseless US taxpayers’] government cash. The story of the New York Police Department under Mr. Adams should put that idea to rest.

Mr. Adams, a former police captain, has called himself the department’s “overbearing dad.” He installed his former cop friends at the top levels of the department and of his administration generally. Many of them padded out their entourages and gave their buddies cushy assignments and huge overtime payouts. That added to the pressure on other cops, who were often forced to work supplemental shifts on top of their regular duties.

“Something’s got to break here,” Kevin O’Connor, a former Police Department assistant commissioner, told me last December [2024]. “You’re running your personnel out so bad that they become ineffective to some point.”

In the four months that followed, 1,400 cops quit.

None had a better reason to leave than Lt. Quathisha Epps.

Lieutenant Epps entered the public conversation last November, when the tabloids called her out for earning more than twice her salary in overtime for a desk job, $403,000 in all. She responded with a shocking accusation in a complaint to the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission: Her boss, the chief of department, Jeff Maddrey, had pressured her into serving that overtime with him at 1 Police Plaza, where he had repeatedly sexually abused her. “I keep saying, ‘Stop, stop, stop, stop, stop.’ And he just kept on,” the lieutenant, a 19-year veteran of the force and a mother of three, recalled, heaving with tears, in a televised interview last March. “This guy is a monster.” She said Mr. Maddrey, a friend and an ally of Mr. Adams for more than 20 years, demanded a kickback from the overtime pay and even told her to pay for a vacation for him and his wife. Mr. Maddrey denied any wrongdoing, claiming his relationship with Lieutenant Epps was

merely an “office fling.”

After the lieutenant came forward with her accusations, nude videos of her circulated on police group chats. Then the Police Department tried to claw back the overtime money that her predator boss allegedly coerced her into taking.

Mr. Adams’s first police commissioner had tried to discipline Mr. Maddrey over an unrelated matter. The mayor overruled her, and she quit not long after that.

Mr. Adams brought in a replacement;

after 14 months, that commissioner resigned amid an investigation into his participation in a scheme to shake down local bars and nightclubs.

When the mayor brought in Tom Donlon, a former F.B.I. official, to take over as interim commissioner, Mr. Adams said he needed someone with a “clean record” to take over.

It took only hours on the job, Mr. Donlon recently told me, to learn that Mr. Adams not only favored his own cronies but also considered them his best guys and expected Mr. Donlon to give them maximum latitude.

In a remarkable federal lawsuit, Mr. Donlon described a culture of corruption that Mr. Adams personally enforced. Top officers “knew they had this pipeline right to Adams and could do whatever they want, Maddrey in particular,” he told me.

Within months, Mr. Donlon was pushed out.

You don’t have to believe, as Mr. Donlon alleged, that all of this makes Mr. Adams the head of some vast racketeering enterprise. And you can give him some credit for hiring the current police commissioner, who appears to operate by the book. But the ballooning overtime, the accusations of selling of promotions, the attempts to neuter internal investigations — that’s all on Mr. Adams.

He ran for mayor on a public safety pledge.

His tolerance for his corruption undercut that. It endangered people, even police officers, like Quathisha Epps, who were

supposed to keep the rest of us safe.

The day Mr. Adams was indicted, Mr. Trump held a news conference at his skyscraper on Fifth Avenue. He cast Mr. Adams as a fellow victim. “I watched about a year ago when he talked about how the illegal migrants are hurting our city,” Mr. Trump recalled. “And I said, ‘You know what? He’ll be indicted within a year.’”

Addressing New Yorkers, Mr. Adams took a more nuanced tone. “I always knew that if I stood my ground for all of you, that I would be a target,” he said. Mr. Adams’s overtures to Mr. Trump grew more direct over time, eventually becoming so intense that the president’s aides were openly laughing at how embarrassing they were.

Despite Mr. Trump’s comments, some people involved in the Adams prosecution thought they could still sell the new administration on the Adams case. “I believed going into the Trump administration that we’d be able to persuade them that this case was righteous and that we were doing the right thing and that we had the goods and that everything was fine, essentially,” said a source with direct knowledge of the legal proceedings.

“In retrospect, obviously, I feel like a dummy for having thought that.”

The prosecutors continued to work at a feverish pace, even as Mr. Trump got ready to take power. They were preparing a fresh indictment of Mr. Adams for obstructing justice. Then Danielle Sassoon, the prosecutor who had just been installed as the Southern District’s top attorney, heard from

Emil Bove, Mr. Trump’s acting No. 2 at the Justice Department.

Mr. Bove saw the Adams case as exactly the kind of criminalization of ordinary politics that sparked the prosecution of Mr. Trump….

In public, Mr. Bove and Mr. Adams insisted that the dismissal of the case did not constitute some kind of shady deal. The White House told me it’s “restoring integrity and fairness to the Department of Justice, which was weaponized under the Biden administration.” The mayor’s allies say his relationship with the president has spared New York from the high-profile influx of federal forces we’ve witnessed in Los Angeles and Chicago….

The thing is, corruption actually is a matter of faith; it corrodes what little faith the public has left in our government.

It teaches people to expect less of public officials, thereby opening the door to more cynical self-dealing and precisely the kind of score settling that the Trump administration has pursued in numerous investigations targeting its political enemies.

Mr. Trump wasted no time in remaking the Justice Department and dismantling anticorruption efforts nationwide….The attorney general, Ms. Bondi, who had been registered as a lobbyist for Qatar, disbanded the F.B.I.’s Foreign Influence Task Force. A handful of public corruption cases have been allowed to continue, but an elite F.B.I. unit dedicated to investigating such crimes at the highest level has been dismantled.

The dismissal of the Adams case was the clearest signal yet that the old guardrails were gone. For decades, the Southern District took on dirty politicians — and it did so by exercising its own judgment. Now it was clear that the so-called Sovereign District of New York would have to follow the White House’s directives. That sent a message to the other U.S. attorney’s offices: Don’t bother going after a high-profile public official, because unless the official is a foe of Mr. Trump, your case has no chance.

Ms. Sassoon and several of her colleagues quit in response.

So did three more members of the Justice Department’s public integrity unit, an office that has now dwindled to just five people from 30.

The judge in Mr. Adams’s case ruled that the grounds for dismissal were bogus, but he admitted that there was nothing he could do to force the Justice Department to finish what it had started.

Mr. Trump and his family have begun a self-enrichment campaign on a scale unrivaled in American history: eight-figure payments from companies like Meta, Disney and Paramount to settle sham lawsuits. A nine-figure jet from Qatar, which Mr. Trump says he’ll donate to his presidential library after he leaves office. Ten figures in crypto acquisitions by Trump Media & Technology Group. The New Yorker magazine put the running total for that and a lot else at $3.4 billion.

Mr. Trump has fired or demoted more than 20 inspectors general, [supposedly] politically independent officials whose mission includes investigating corruption. He nominated Mr. Bove to a lifetime seat as a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals. When a whistle-blower — one of three — filed a complaint trying to block the confirmation, the Office of Inspector General said it lost the complaint for two months….

On June 26, [2025] Mr. Adams began his re-election campaign on the steps of City Hall.

Winnie Greco and Ingrid Lewis-Martin are once again part of the team. As though the past 12 months had never happened, people listed in public records as Adams donors are once again saying they never gave.

The first day of September was Eric Adams’s 65th birthday. This time the mayor headed to Florida for what his spokesman said was a personal trip. Turns out he was meeting with Steve Witkoff, a real estate mogul who is Mr. Trump’s Middle East envoy. The last time they had gotten together in Florida, it had been with Mr. Trump, back in January, shortly before the administration took the first steps to deep-six Mr. Adams’s case.

This time, a new transaction was in the air: Members of Team Trump

wanted Mr. Adams to drop his re-election bid, to help clear the field for Andrew Cuomo,

a rival for City Hall who had been the subject of his own criminal investigations.

Mr. Witkoff was pushing the idea of Mr. Adams as ambassador to Saudi Arabia. When word got out, the mayor issued a statement saying he would “always listen if called to serve our country.” Shortly after that, he proclaimed he was going to be mayor for “another four years.” The front pages of the New York City tabloids framed it as a negotiation: What kind of payoff would it take to make him go away.

It felt at once both shocking and familiar, another in an endless round of deal making and scandal. The Trumpists are right: Politics is transactional. It does bend toward corruption. But only if you let it.”

 

 

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Monday, September 8, 2025

In 2020 CDC Labs were contaminated, sent Covid tests infected with Covid to states. Sloppy lab practices delayed Covid testing. "Astonishing lack of expertise, nobody was in charge." CDC lost credibility as US leading public health agency-NY Times, 4/18/2020

4/18/2020, “C.D.C. Labs Were Contaminated, Delaying Coronavirus Testing, Officials Say,” NY Times, Sheila Kaplan

Sloppy laboratory practices at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention caused contamination that rendered the nation’s first coronavirus tests ineffective,

federal officials confirmed on Saturday.

Two of the three C.D.C. laboratories in Atlanta that created the coronavirus test kits violated their own manufacturing standards, resulting in the agency

sending tests that did not work to nearly all of the 100 state and local public health labs,

according to the Food and Drug Administration.

Early on, the F.D.A., which oversees laboratory tests, sent Dr. Timothy Stenzel, chief of in vitro diagnostics and radiological health, to the C.D.C. labs to assess the problem, several officials said.

He found

an astonishing lack of expertise in commercial manufacturing and learned that

nobody was in charge of the entire process, they said.

Problems ranged from researchers entering and exiting the coronavirus laboratories without changing their coats,

to test ingredients being assembled in the same room 

where researchers were working on positive coronavirus samples, officials said.

Those practices made the tests sent to public health labs unusable because they were contaminated with the coronavirus, and produced some inconclusive results.

In a statement on Saturday, a spokeswoman for the F.D.A., Stephanie Caccomo, said, “C.D.C. did not manufacture its test consistent with its own protocol.”

The F.D.A. confirmed its conclusions late this week after several media outlets requested public disclosure of its inquiry, which assuredly is part of a larger federal investigation into the C.D.C. lab irregularities by the Department of Health and Human Services.

Forced to suspend the launch of a nationwide detection program for the coronavirus for a month,

the C.D.C. lost credibility as the nation’s leading public health agency

and the country lost ground in ways that continue to haunt grieving families, the sick and the worried well from one state to the next.

To this day, the C.D.C.’s singular failure symbolizes how unprepared the federal government was in the early days to combat a fast-spreading outbreak of a new virus and it also highlights the glaring inability at the onset to establish a systematic testing policy that would have revealed the still unknown rates of infection in many regions of the country. The blunders are posing new problems as some states with few cases agitate to reopen and others remain in virtual lockdown with cases and deaths still climbing.

While President Trump and other members of his administration [in 2020]

assert almost daily that the U.S. testing capacity is greater than anywhere else in the world,

many public health officials and epidemiologists have lamented the lack of consistent, reliable testing across the country that would reflect the true prevalence of the infection and perhaps enable a return to some semblance of normal life.

Dr. Robert R. Redfield, the director of the C.D.C., and other health experts have long suggested that contamination in the labs might have been the culprit. But even as several officials at the F.D.A. late this week cited contamination as the cause, a spokesman for the C.D.C., Benjamin Haynes, asserted that it was still just a possibility and that

the agency was still awaiting the formal findings of H.H.S.

In a statement, however, he acknowledged that the agency’s quality control measures were insufficient during the coronavirus test development. Since then, he said, “C.D.C. implemented enhanced quality control to address the issue and will be assessing the issue moving forward.”

Initially, the C.D.C. was responsible for creating a coronavirus test that state and local public health agencies could use to diagnose Covid-19 in people, and then isolate them to prevent the spread of the disease.

“It was just tragic,” said Scott Becker, executive director of the Association of Public Health Laboratories. “All that time when we were sitting there waiting, I really felt like, here we were at one of the most critical junctures in public health history, and the biggest tool in our toolbox was missing.”

Mr. Becker said that public health laboratories started receiving the C.D.C. kits on Feb. 7, and by the next day members were already calling him to report that the test was not working accurately. He alerted both the C.D.C. and

the F.D.A., which regulates medical devices, including laboratory tests.

“This is consistent with what we said was plausible when we found the problem at the beginning,” Mr. Becker said. “When we found the problem, it seemed to our community that it was a contamination issue that would cause a problem to this extent.”

The F.D.A. concluded that C.D.C. manufacturing issues were to blame and pushed the agency to shift production to an outside firm. That company, I.D.T., accelerated production of the C.D.C. test and says no more issues were reported.

Meanwhile, the F.D.A. also came under fire for not initially allowing commercial labs like Quest and LabCorp and others to begin ramping up production of their own tests.

More than two months later, nearly 700,000 Americans have become infected and close to 40,000 have died. Testing is still rationed in some states and uneven in others, and it can take days before doctors and patients receive results. Many infectious disease and public health experts say

testing is nowhere near widespread enough

to reopen the country

or return to some semblance of normal.”

…………….

“A version of this article appears in print on April 19, 2020, Section A, Page 5 of the New York edition with the headline: C.D.C. Labs Were Contaminated, Delaying National Rollout of Testing, Officials Say.”

 

 

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Monday, August 18, 2025

16 year old Donbass girl writes a letter to Melania Trump informing her that it was Ukrainian regime that unleashed war in Donbass in 2014 and whom she needed to write to about it

10/14/2014, Ukraine Pres. Poroshenko speech in Odessa: “Their children will hole up in the basements – this is how we win the war! [Eng. subs.]

……………………………

"“Hello, Mrs. Trump! My name is Faina Savenkova. I am one of those children of war that you write about in your letter to Russian President Vladimir Putin....I, as a child who has been living under shelling by the Ukrainian army for eleven years now..."

8/18/2025, Europe Demands ‘Security Guarantees’ For Ukraine … Russia Can Give Those, Moon of Alabama

Comment #101:

Faina Savenkova, Photo: Personal archive”

Sixteen-year-old Faina Savenkova from Lugansk has written an open letter to Melania Trump:

“I reminded Mrs. Trump who started this war

and who she needed to contact”:

16-year-old Faina Savenkova explains why she wrote a letter to the wife of the U.S. President (Komsomolskaya Pravda – Lugansk, Konstantin Knyazev, August 18, 2025 — in Russian)

Sixteen-year-old Lugansk resident Faina Savenkova is a young writer and journalist. This year she graduated from school and entered a journalism faculty. The girl has long been known outside the republic for her repeated appeals to world leaders and the UN. For this, the Kiev regime posted Faina’s data on the Mirotvorets [“Peacemaker” — S] website; she was only 12 years old at the time.

And now she could not remain silent after learning that Donald Trump’s wife Melania handed Russian President Vladimir Putin a letter during his visit to Alaska. Faina also read this letter—Trump uploaded it to his social networks. In her message, Melania Trump calls on Russian President Vladimir Putin to protect the innocence of children, arguing that all children, regardless of their place of birth, deserve love, opportunities, and safety.

The Lugansk resident was outraged by the fact that

[Map of Ukraine, shaded areas are Luhansk and Donbass]

the letter did not mention that it was the Ukrainian regime that unleashed the war in Donbass in 2014. And Zelenskiy, having come to power in Ukraine, promised to end the conflict,

but lied and unleashed a bloodbath.

“My appeal is a reaction to the letter that Melania Trump wrote to our President Putin. In her letter, the First Lady of the White House asks Putin to save children and stop the war. On the one hand, she cares about the children of Ukraine and Donbass, but on the other hand,

she does not mention Ukraine and the illegitimate President Zelenskiy.

After all, it is the Ukrainian government and army that are responsible for the murders of children in Donbass. And now in the border regions of Russia. Therefore, I really wanted

to remind Mrs. Trump

who started this war

and to whom she should have addressed such a letter,” Faina Savenkova told the KP-Lugansk website.

[Most in Donbass voted in 2010 for Pres. Yanukovich whom US violently removed in 2014--without consulting Donbass voters]

Faina wrote her letter to the First Lady of the United States of America Melania Trump and sent it. Here it is:

“Hello, Mrs. Trump! My name is Faina Savenkova. I am one of those children of war that you write about in your letter to Russian President Vladimir Putin. I know that you, like Russian President Vladimir Putin and U.S. President Donald Trump, want peace to come to us, and for children to no longer fall asleep praying not to die and wake up the next morning. But

I, as a child who has been living under shelling by the Ukrainian army for eleven years now, want to tell you that in order to stop the war and save children in Donbass and Ukraine,

first of all we need to turn to Ukrainian President Zelenskiy.

In Donetsk and Lugansk there are memorials dedicated to the children of Donbass who died, whose lives were cut short by Ukrainian shelling. Children are dying now because of the war unleashed by Europe and former U.S. President Biden.

In 2021, I addressed the UN with a video message that the children of Donbass have the right to a peaceful life, after which the Ukrainian nationalist website Mirotvorets published my family’s and my personal data,

after which I began to receive threats and insults.

Only because I asked world powers to help the children of Donbass live peacefully and happily, as children should. Now this website contains the personal data of almost 400 children who are also in danger. President Zelenskiy can stop this website with one stroke of the pen and return the children to a peaceful life,

but he still does not do this.

You can help influence Ukraine’s compliance not only with international laws, but also with its own laws, protecting children from criminals.

I believe that it is in your power!

We, the children of Donbass, Belgorod and Kursk regions, did not start this war, and I have always advocated for children to live in peace and not be afraid to close their eyes and fall asleep. As a person fighting for children’s right to a peaceful life, I think you will understand me.

We have been trying to survive under Ukrainian shelling for too long, and now our dream is simple—help us see a peaceful sky above our heads!””

“Posted by: S | Aug 18 2025 20:00 utc | 101″

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Friday, July 18, 2025

Curtis Sliwa in statistical tie for NY City Mayor in Nov. 2025 election in both 4-way race and 3-way race w/out Adams-HarrisX poll, July 7-8, 2025

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

7/15/25, HarrisX NYC Poll: Tight Race Emerges in NYC Mayoral General Election, But Cuomo Stronger Than Adams Against Mamdani” 

HarrisX NYC Poll: July 7-8 2025″

“New HarrisX Poll Shows Open and Competitive Field

in Four- and Three- Candidate Race Permutations

Cuomo Leads Mamdani in a Head-to-Head Race by 15 Points”

NEW YORK, July 15, 2025 /PRNewswire/ — “A new poll from HarrisX finds the New York City mayoral race shaping up to be a tight and competitive contest, with Assemblymember Zohran Mamdani

statistically tied with former Governor Andrew Cuomo and Republican candidate Curtis Sliwa

in a four-way race.

While Mamdani leads Mayor Eric Adams in a head-to-head race, the poll shows Cuomo defeating the Democratic nominee by a wide 15-point margin in a one-on-one contest.

The survey of 585 registered New York City voters was conducted online between July 7–8, with key findings including:

  • In a four-way race, Mamdani (26 percent) is tied with Cuomo (23 percent) and Sliwa (22 percent), all within the margin of error. Adams is at 13 percent and 15 percent of voters are undecided.
  • In a three-way race without Adams, Cuomo (31 percent) is statistically tied with Mamdani (29 percent) and Sliwa (28 percent).
  • In a three-way race without Cuomo, Mamdani leads by 10 points, winning 35 percent to Sliwa’s 25 percent and Adams’ 19 percent.
  • In head-to-head matchups, Mamdani topples Adams 43 percent to 36 percent, but trails Cuomo 35 percent to 50 percent, a 15-point advantage for Cuomo.

The results show that Mamdani benefits most if Cuomo is not in the race, gaining a 10-point lead in that scenario. Conversely, Cuomo gains ground if Adams is not in the race and wins outright in a head-to-head matchup with Mamdani.

“These numbers show a volatile race still taking shape,” said Dritan Nesho, CEO of HarrisX. “While the progressive base is fueling Mamdani’s rise, Cuomo’s broad name recognition and moderate appeal make him a formidable general election challenger.”

Survey Methodology

This survey was conducted online from July 7–8, 2025 among 585 registered voters in New York City.

Respondents are recruited through opt-in, web-panel recruitment sampling.

Recruitment occurs through a broad variety of professional, validated respondent panels to expand the sampling frame as wide as possible and minimize the impact of any given panel on recruiting methods. The results reflect a representative sample of likely registered voters in New York City.

Results were weighted for age, gender, race/ethnicity, income, education, borough, party,

and ideology where necessary to align them with their actual proportions in the population.

The margin of error for the total sample is ±4.1 percentage points.

This study was conducted independently by HarrisX

prior to Andrew Cuomo’s announcement to run as an independent in the general election.

About HarrisX

HarrisX is a leading strategic research, data analytics and AI consultancy focused on emerging technologies, business and social trends, public policy and politics. HarrisX conducts multi-method research in the United States and over 50 countries around the world on behalf of Fortune 100 companies, public institutions, NGOs, global leaders and philanthropic organizations.

HarrisX was the most accurate pollster of the 2020 U.S. presidential election, and one of the most accurate outfits in the 2024 presidential election,

correctly calling the results in five out of seven battleground states and the national vote.” Above image from Harrisx

 

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Friday, May 9, 2025

Key to US strategy is to prevent US taxpayers from knowing that they funded Odessa massacre in May 2014 which burned 48 people alive for objecting to US coup of Ukraine-Consortium News

The key is not to let the American people [who pay the bills] in on the secret” that “their” government backs events like burning innocents alive in the 2014 Odessa massacres":

Odessa on world map

4/20/2022, “Curfew for [8th] Anniversary of Odessa Massacre That Sparked Rebellion, Consortium News, Joe Lauria: “[Ukraine] Authorities in the Ukrainian port city of Odessa have set a 24-hour curfew from May 1-3 [2022] to prevent protests commemorating the burning alive on May 2, 2014 of 

48 people who had rejected the U.S.-backed coup in Kiev earlier that year [2014]….For the duration of the ‘curfew’ Odessans are not allowed to leave their homes.”…

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Above, Grim Reaper: Feb. 2016, “State Dept’s Mission: Coup d’etat,” The Technocratic Tyranny

……………………………………………….

This weekend marks the 11th anniversary” of the US-backed burning alive of 48 human beings in the Odessa massacre.

On May 2, 2014, Neo-Nazi gangs massacred 48 people

who had rejected the U.S.-backed overthrow

of a democratically-elected government in Kiev earlier that year.

The deliberately-set fire in the Trade Unions Building in Odessa has never been satisfactorily investigated by Ukrainian authorities.

Eight days later [May 2014] two ethnic Russian majority

oblasts in the east declared independence from Ukraine,

leading to the U.S.-backed war against them by the unconstitutional government….[By brutally violent means, Ukraine thugs helped Ukraine become a US colony. No one had asked the people in Eastern regions if they wanted to be a US colony].

This is how Robert Parry, founder of Consortium News, reported the story on May 10, 2014. He emphasized

the effort by the U.S. government and media to bury the U.S. role

in the 2014 unconstitutional change of government and the part played by Neo-Nazis in Ukraine, which the U.S. government, corporate media and their “anti-disinformation” allies are still trying to hide. 

“The key to all these unsavory alliances

is for the American people not to know about the real nature of these U.S. clients,” he wrote.”

“May 10, 2014, Exclusive: For the second time in a week, Ukrainian anti-regime protesters holed up in a building were killed by fires set by pro-regime attackers with ties to newly formed neo-Nazi security forces, reports Robert Parry.”

By Robert Parry, Special to Consortium News
First published May 10, 2014

In Ukraine, a grisly new strategy bringing in neo-Nazi paramilitary forces

to set fire to occupied buildings

in the country’s rebellious southeast appears to be emerging as

a favored tactic as the [US taxpayer funded] coup-installed regime in Kiev seeks to put down resistance from ethnic Russians and other opponents.

The technique first emerged on May 2 [2014] in the port city of Odessa when pro-regime militants

chased dissidents into the Trade Unions Building and then set it on fire.

Image: "Odessa, Ukraine. 2nd May, 2021. A man prays in front of the Trade Unions House of Odessa where more than 40 persons where killed in 2014," alamy

As some 40 or more ethnic Russians were burned alive or died of smoke inhalation, the crowd outside mocked them as red-and-black Colorado potato beetles, with the chant of “Burn, Colorado, burn.”

Afterwards, reporters spotted graffiti on the building’s walls containing Swastika-like symbols and honoring the “Galician SS,” the Ukrainian adjunct to the German SS in World War II.

This tactic of torching an occupied building occurred again on May 9 [2014] in Mariupol, another port city,

as neo-Nazi paramilitaries organized now as the regime’s “National Guard” were dispatched

to a police station that had been seized by dissidents, possibly including police officers who rejected a new Kiev-appointed chief.

Again, the deployment of the “National Guard” was followed by burning the building and killing a significant but still-undetermined number of people inside. (Early estimates of the dead range from seven to 20.)

In the U.S. press, Ukraine’s “National Guard” is usually described as a new force derived from the Maidan’s “self-defense” units that spearheaded the Feb. 22 revolt in Kiev overthrowing elected President Viktor Yanukovych.

But the Maidan’s “self-defense” units were drawn primarily

from well-organized bands of neo-Nazi extremists from western Ukraine

who hurled firebombs at police and fired weapons

as the anti-Yanukovych protests turned increasingly violent.

But the mainstream U.S. press in line with State Department guidance has sought to minimize or dismiss the key role played by neo-Nazis in these “self-defense” forces as well as in the new government.

At most, you’ll see references to

these neo-Nazis as “Ukrainian nationalists.”

Turning to the Neo-Nazis

Odessa Trade Union Building on fire, May 2, 2014. (Screenshot from Roses Have Thorns, Part 6, The Odessa Massacre)

However, as resistance to Kiev’s [US-backed] right-wing regime expanded in the ethnic Russian east and south,

the coup regime found itself unable to count on regular Ukrainian troops

to fire on civilians.

Thus, its national security chief Andriy Parubiy, himself a neo-Nazi, turned to the intensely motivated

neo-Nazi shock troops

who had been battle-tested during the coup.

These extremists were reorganized as special units of the National Guard and dispatched to the east and south to do the dirty work that the regular Ukrainian military was unwilling to do.

Many of these extreme Ukrainian nationalists lionize World War II Nazi collaborator Stepan Bandera and like Bandera dream of a racially pure Ukraine, free of Jews, ethnic Russians and other “inferior” beings.

The slur of calling the Odessa protesters Colorado beetles — as they were being burned alive — was a reference to the black-and-red colors used by the ethnic Russian resistance in the east.

Though the mainstream U.S. press either describes Parubiy simply as the interim government’s chief of national security (with no further context) or possibly as a “nationalist,” his fuller background includes his founding of the Social-National Party of Ukraine in 1991, blending radical Ukrainian nationalism with neo-Nazi symbols. Last year, he became commandant of the Maidan’s “self-defense forces.”

[See: Curfew for Anniversary of Odessa Massacre That Sparked Rebellion]

Then, on April 15, [2014]  after becoming the Kiev regime’s chief of national security and finding Ukrainian troops unwilling to fire on fellow Ukrainians in the east, Parubiy went on Twitter to announce, “Reserve unit of National Guard formed #Maidan Self-defense volunteers was sent to the front line this morning.”

Those National Guard forces also were reported on the ground in Odessa when the trade unions building was torched on May 2 and they showed up again in Mariupol as the police station was burned on May 9, according to a report in The New York Times on Saturday.

The Times mentioned the appearance and then disappearance of the National Guard without providing any useful background about this newly organized force.

In the language used by the mainstream U.S. press and the Kiev regime, the neo-Nazi brigades are “volunteers” and “self-defense” units while the rebels resisting the post-coup regime are “pro-Russian militants” or “terrorists.”

The Times reported the May 9 [2014] attack in Mariupol this way:

“Ukraine’s interior minister, Arsen Avakov, wrote on Facebook that about 60 pro-Russian militants had tried to seize the city’s police headquarters. The police called for support from the Ukrainian national guard, a newly formed force of quickly trained volunteers drawn from participants in last winter’s street protests in the capital.

Mr. Avakov wrote that 20 ‘terrorists’ had died in the fighting, while those who survived dispersed and hid in a residential neighborhood.”

The Times added:

“The national guard, though, pulled out of the city soon afterward. Residents who had gathered around the police station offered an account that differed from the interior minister’s. The city police, they said, were sympathetic to the pro-Russian side and had mutinied against an out-of-town chief newly installed by the interim government in Kiev.

Armored vehicles had driven into the city to confront the rebellious police, not the militants, residents said. Holes in the brick wall suggested heavy weaponry. Gunfire echoed downtown.”

After the deaths inside Mariupol’s police station, the Kiev regime rejoiced at the extermination of a large number of “terrorists.”

As the U.K.’s Independent reported, “The military action is accompanied by stridently aggressive rhetoric from politicians in Kiev who are crowing about the numbers of ‘terrorists’ killed and threatening further lethal punishment.”

The Kiev’s regime’s concern that some local police forces have at best mixed loyalties has led it again to turn to the Maidan “self-defense” forces to serve as a special “Kiev-1” police force, which was dispatched to Odessa amid that city’s recent violence.

Deniable Forces

A group of Nicaraguan Contras rest after a firefight, Jan. 1, 1987. (Tiomono, CC BY-SA 3.0, Wikimedia Commons)

Though many Americans don’t want to believe that their government would collaborate with neo-Nazis or other extremist elements, there

actually has been a long history of just that.

In conflicts as diverse as the revolutions in Central America and the anti-Soviet Afghan war in the 1980s to the current civil conflicts in Syria and Ukraine, it has not been uncommon for

the side favored by the United States to rely on extremist paramilitary forces to engage in the most brutal fighting.

In Central American conflicts that I covered for the Associated Press and Newsweek in the 1980s, some of the “death squads” associated with pro-U.S. regimes were drawn from neo-fascist movements allied with the far-right World Anti-Communist League.

In Afghanistan, the C.I.A. relied on Islamist extremists, including Saudi jihadist Osama bin Laden,

to kill Russians and their Afghan government allies.

Today, in Syria, many of the most aggressive fighters against Bashar al-Assad’s government

are Arab jihadists recruited from across the region and armed by Saudi Arabia and other Persian Gulf oil sheikdoms.

So, it fits with a pattern for the U.S. government to hold its nose and rely on neo-Nazis from western Ukraine to take the fight to rebellious ethnic Russians in the east and south.

The key to all these unsavory alliances is for the American people not to know about the real nature of these U.S. clients.

In the 1980s, the Reagan administration advanced the concept of “public diplomacy”

to intimidate journalists and human rights activists who dared report on the brutality

of U.S.-backed forces in El Salvador and Guatemala and the C.I.A.-trained Contra rebels in Nicaragua.

Thus, most Americans weren’t sure what to make of recurring reports about right-wing

“death squads” killing priests and nuns

and committing other massacres across Central America.

Regarding Afghanistan, it took the American people until Sept. 11, 2001, to fully comprehend whom the Reagan administration had been working with in the 1980s.

Similarly, the Obama administration has tried to maintain the fiction that the Syrian opposition

is dominated by well-meaning “moderates.”…

So, it should come as no surprise that the Kiev regime would turn to its Maidan “self-defense” forces formed around neo-Nazi militias to go into southern and eastern Ukraine with the purpose of burning to death ethnic Russian “insects” occupying buildings.

The key is not to let the American people [who pay all the bills] in on the secret.

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“[For more, see Consortium News‘ “Ukraine, Through the U.S. ‘Looking Glass.’”]

The late investigative reporter Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories for The Associated Press and Newsweek in the 1980s.  He began Consortium News in 1995.”

 

 

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I'm the daughter of an Eagle Scout and World War II Air Force pilot born in Brooklyn, finally settling in New Jersey.