May 26, 2018 in 4,015 words

Michael Cohen: inside the strange world of Trump’s fixer

_{^{The lawyer who rose from the taxi business to fixing the future president’s messiest problems now faces severe legal jeopardy after an FBI raid}}

Just before he got his dream job as Donald Trump’s right-hand man, Michael Cohen was quoted in a 2007 tabloid news story hyping a Trump condo development in New Jersey.

“Trump properties are solid investments,” said Cohen, who by then had bought at least three.

Trump’s decision to hire Cohen has served the president well over the years, particularly for tasks requiring a mix of bluster and discretion – skills Cohen might have picked up in his days as a personal injury lawyer or in the taxi cab business.

But with prosecutors closing in on Cohen, his lifelong investment in Trump is beginning to look shaky. The question now is: will one of the president’s most devoted lieutenants decide, at some point, to cut his losses and cooperate with prosecutors investigating alleged collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia?

On 9 April, FBI agents raided Cohen’s residence, hotel room, office, safety deposit box and electronic devices, seizing evidence of potential crimes described by the government as relating to Cohen’s “business dealings”. An indictment of Cohen is “likely”, a federal judge wrote in a separate case.

The raids were conducted after the special counsel heading up the Russia investigation, Robert Mueller, referred information to an independent team of federal prosecutors in the southern district of New York, effectively carving out the Cohen case and protecting it from any potential move by the president against Mueller. …

What Would Actually Happen if Trump Refused a Subpoena?

_{If the president does not want to testify in Robert Mueller’s investigation, there simply is no realistic way for the courts to physically force him to do so.}

_{President Trump speaks with California lawmakers during a meeting at the White House on May 16.}

As President Trump and Special Counsel Robert Mueller continue to dance around the possibility of an interview, it is, perhaps, useful to think about how a confrontation between the two might play out. Imagine that negotiations come to an unsuccessful conclusion and Mueller is motivated to issue a subpoena to Trump.

What happens then?

As far as the public record reflects, a president has only been subpoenaed once before, when Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr tried to compel former President Bill Clinton to appear in front of a grand jury during his sprawling inquiry into the Clintons in the 1990s, an investigation in which I served as a senior counsel. In the end, Clinton agreed to a voluntary interview and the subpoena was withdrawn, so the country never learned what could happen if a president were to fight a subpoena.

President Trump might very well have good grounds for attempting to avoid an appearance. As far back as the 1807 federal case against Aaron Burr for treason, then-President Thomas Jefferson objected to a subpoena, and the court there opined that it would be problematic for the judiciary to order a president to be in a particular place at a particular time. Much the same language was used by the Supreme Court when it weighed in on Paula Jones’ suit against Clinton alleging sexual harassment: The suit could go forward, but courts should be cautious about ordering presidents around.

Let’s say, however, that Trump receives a subpoena and fights it to the Supreme Court. And let’s say that, in the end, the Court sides with the special counsel and tells Trump he has to appear before the grand jury.

What if the president just says “no”? …

How One Woman’s Fight to Save Her Family Helped Lead to a Mass Exoneration

_{Clarissa Glenn set out to prove that a Chicago police officer framed her husband. Now the city is reckoning with years of wrongful arrests.}

_{“You’re not supposed to hate anyone, but these officers changed my entire being,” Clarissa Glenn said.}

Clarissa Glenn’s troubles with the law began on Mother’s Day, 2004, when she was on her way to the Pancake House with her three sons—Ben, Jr., Gerard, and Deon. They left their apartment in the Ida B. Wells Homes, a housing project on the South Side of Chicago, to meet her partner, Ben Baker, outside the building. They found him talking with a police sergeant named Ronald Watts, a notorious figure in the project. Watts oversaw a team of police officers who were supposed to be rooting out the project’s drug trade, but he was in fact running his own “criminal enterprise,” as another officer later put it. Watts extorted money from drug dealers and other residents, and when they didn’t pay him he fabricated drug charges against them. That morning, Ben said, the sergeant had tried to shake him down. Ben told him, “Man, fuck you. Do your motherfucking job,” before walking away.

Clarissa and Ben, who were both in their early thirties, had been together since they were teen-agers. For seven years, they had lived with their sons in the Wells, as the project was known. Ben had grown up there and was used to dealing with hostile, sometimes corrupt officers, but Clarissa, whose father had been a private detective, expected better treatment from the police. In the months after Ben’s confrontation with Watts, whenever she saw a police officer talking to Ben she intervened, marching up to the officer and saying, “What’s going on?” One time, as Clarissa approached, an officer said to Ben, “Here comes your lawyer.”

On the afternoon of March 23, 2005, Clarissa saw from a window in their apartment that several officers had detained Ben, and she followed them to the police station. According to the police report, the officers had caught Ben with packets of heroin in one hand and packets of crack cocaine in his pocket. Prosecutors charged him with drug possession with intent to sell. Ben, who was unemployed and watched the boys after school, had a history of selling drugs, and he was three weeks away from finishing a two-year probation sentence for a drug case. If he was convicted of the new charges, he faced up to sixty years in prison. On April 2nd, he was released from jail pending trial. Clarissa, who worked as an administrator at a home-health-care agency, picked him up.

Ben said that Watts had framed him. Clarissa believed him, and so did his lawyer, Matthew Mahoney, who had represented him in a previous case, and had worked in the nineties as a prosecutor in the public-corruption unit at the Cook County state’s attorney’s office. In May, Mahoney accompanied Clarissa and Ben to the state’s attorney’s office, where they met with two police sergeants, an agent from the Chicago Police Department’s internal-affairs division, and a prosecutor named David Navarro. Clarissa and Ben assumed that the authorities would be surprised to hear about Watts’s conduct, but they held up one photo after another of Watts’s team. “It was, like, Do you know who this is? Do you know who this is?” Clarissa recalled. “They were already investigating.” …

The trouble with charitable billionaires

_{More and more wealthy CEOs are pledging to give away parts of their fortunes – often to help fix problems their companies caused. Some call this ‘philanthrocapitalism’, but is it just corporate hypocrisy?}

In February 2017, Facebook’s founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg was in the headlines for his charitable activities. The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, founded by the tech billionaire and his wife, Priscilla Chan, handed out over $3m in grants to aid the housing crisis in the Silicon Valley area. David Plouffe, the Initiative’s president of policy and advocacy, stated that the grants were intended to “support those working to help families in immediate crisis while supporting research into new ideas to find a long-term solution – a two-step strategy that will guide much of our policy and advocacy work moving forward”.

This is but one small part of Zuckerberg’s charity empire. The Initiative has committed billions of dollars to philanthropic projects designed to address social problems, with a special focus on solutions driven by science, medical research and education. This all took off in December 2015, when Zuckerberg and Chan wrote and published a letter to their new baby Max. The letter made a commitment that over the course of their lives they would donate 99% of their shares in Facebook (at the time valued at $45bn) to the “mission” of “advancing human potential and promoting equality”.

The housing intervention is of course much closer to home, dealing with issues literally at the door of Facebook’s Menlo Park head office. This is an area where median house prices almost doubled to around $2m in the five years between 2012 and 2017.

More generally, San Francisco is a city with massive income inequality, and the reputation of having the most expensive housing in the US. Chan Zuckerberg’s intervention was clearly designed to offset social and economic problems caused by rents and house prices having skyrocketed to such a level that even tech workers on six-figure salaries find it hard to get by. For those on more modest incomes, supporting themselves, let alone a family, is nigh-on impossible. …

DEGREE OF DIFFICULTY: Prepare to spend a while; it’s The Long Read.

‘There’s a Perception That Canada Is Being Invaded’

_{Justin Trudeau’s government has started rejecting more refugee claims from migrants who cross the U.S.-Canada border on foot.}

_{Asylum seekers walk down Roxham Road to cross into Quebec at the U.S.-Canada border in 2017.}

It may seem paradoxical. Last year, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau appeared to issue an open invitation to refugees with a tweet declaring, “to those fleeing persecution, terror & war … #WelcomeToCanada.” This year, his government is working hard to deter thousands of people who are walking over the U.S. border to seek asylum in Canada.

Canada has begun granting refugee status to fewer irregular border crossers—that is, people who walk into the country without going through a designated port of entry. Since President Donald Trump was elected, over 27,000 people have crossed into Canada overland. (By comparison, only 2,000 people did this in 2016.) In 2017, the country granted refugee status to 53 percent of such border crossers, but that number was down to 40 percent in the first three months of this year, Reuters reported. Did Trudeau change his mind about Canada’s welcoming posture in general? Or is something else at work here?

Canada has built a reputation for warmly embracing Syrians. But most of the newcomers are from elsewhere. At first, it was mostly Haitians in the U.S. who made the journey. Some said they were spooked by Trump’s anti-immigrant rhetoric and worried about losing the temporary residence status they’d been given in the U.S. following the 2010 earthquake in their native country. In recent months, Nigerians have become the most frequent border crossers. Many get visitor visas to come to the U.S., then take a bus or taxi to upstate New York, where they walk north into Quebec—straight into the arms of Canadian border guards waiting to arrest them.

The migrants are typically detained for a few hours and then bussed to an emergency shelter in Montreal, where they stay and work on their asylum applications. While they wait for their cases to be adjudicated, they can access healthcare and send their children to public school for free, just like any Canadian. And some citizens are not too thrilled about that. …

5 People Who Straight Up Survived The Unsurvivable

The real world is set up like one of those stupidly elaborate traps from the Saw movies: seriously vicious, kinda dumb, and built entirely to test one’s will to live. But the Saw movies did have survivors (including, somehow, the franchise itself). Even in the face of certain death, some people get by through sheer willpower, indomitable spirit, and possibly God just owing them one. These people told Death exactly where to stick it, and lived to tell the tale.

5. Joan Murray’s Parachute Failed, But She Was Saved By … A Nest Of Fire Ants?

In September of 1999, Joan Murray’s parachute failed to open. Her reserve chute opened 700 feet from the ground, and if that doesn’t sound like enough distance to slow from terminal velocity and land safely, that’s because it’s not. The fall shattered the entire right side of her body, and as she lay there immobilized, she discovered something else: She’d landed on a mound of fire ants. More than 250,000 of them.

_{Then, everything changed when the fire ants attacked.}

Although it must have seemed like God had forsaken her at the time, the 200-plus fire ant stings actually saved her life. According to her doctors, the repeated stinging shocked her heart and stimulated her nerves, keeping her pulse up and her organs functioning long enough to be transferred to the hospital, where she fell into a two-week coma but eventually made a full recovery. Also, that is basically Catwoman’s origin story in Batman Returns, so what’s “fantastically, stupidly impossible” now, movie critics? …

What’s Really Making Us Fat?

_{It may not be as simple as calories in, calories out. New research reveals a far more complex equation for weight gain that places at least some of the blame on organic pollutants.}

Conventional wisdom says that weight gain or loss is based on the energy balance model of “calories in, calories out,” which is often reduced to the simple refrain, “eat less, and exercise more.” But new research reveals a far more complex equation that appears to rest on several other important factors affecting weight gain. Researchers in a relatively new field are looking at the role of industrial chemicals and non-caloric aspects of foods — called obesogens — in weight gain. Scientists conducting this research believe that these substances that are now prevalent in our food supply may be altering the way our bodies store fat and regulate our metabolism. But not everyone agrees. Many scientists, nutritionists, and doctors are still firm believers in the energy balance model. A debate has ensued, leaving a rather unclear picture as to what’s really at work behind our nation’s spike in obesity.

Bruce Blumberg, professor of developmental and cell biology and pharmaceutical sciences at the University of California, Irvine, who coined the term “obesogen,” studies the effect that organotins — a class of persistent organic pollutants that are widely used in the manufacture of polyvinylchloride plastics, as fungicides and pesticides on crops, as slimicides in industrial water systems, as wood preservatives, and as marine antifouling agents — have on the body’s metabolism. Organotins, which he considers to be obesogens, “change how your body responds to calories,” he says. “So the ones we study, tributyltin and triphenyltin, actually cause exposed animals to have more and bigger fat cells. The animals that we treat with these chemicals don’t eat a different diet than the ones who don’t get fat. They eat the same diet — we’re not challenging them with a high-fat or a high-carbohydrate diet. They’re eating normal food, and they’re getting fatter.”

A widely reported study that came out in January in The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition (AJCN) would seem to dispute this finding: it confirms the belief in the energy balance model, and has been cited as proof by many researchers working in the field. I asked an author of the study, Dr. George Bray, professor of medicine at Louisiana State University, about the myriad of additives and industrial ingredients in our food that were not accounted for in this study. “It doesn’t make any difference,” he said in a telephone interview. “Calories count. If you can show me that it doesn’t work, I’d love to see it. Or anybody else who says it doesn’t — there ain’t no data the other way around.” …

How to topple a dictator: the rebel plot that freed the Gambia

_{After 22 years, Yahya Jammeh seemed unassailable. His brutal and reckless rule was finally ended by a small but courageous resistance.}

On Saturday 13 August 2016, six bodyguards from the protection detail of the Gambia’s president, Yahya Jammeh, squeezed into a rental car and drove to the sprawling coastal town of Serekunda. They stopped in Senegambia, the capital’s famous party street, where music blares from bars and white tourists walk around in flip-flops hand-in-hand with young lovers. The men drank some juice and nibbled at some food as they awaited nightfall.

At 1am, when they considered it was safe to move, they got back in the car and drove towards the headquarters of Jammeh’s ruling party, the Alliance for Patriotic Reorientation and Construction (APRC). They stopped a little distance from the building and peered through the darkness. The building seemed empty. After circling it twice they parked the car 300 metres away. There was only one guard, in a small shed close to the entrance.

The guard, taken by surprise, was tied up and gagged, and four men kept watch while two entered the building. They knew what they were looking for, but they overturned shelves and tables and threw items around the room to make their visit look like a random act of vandalism.

In another room, they piled chairs and computers in the middle of the floor, with folders, binders and papers. On top of the pile, they placed what they had come for: three cardboard boxes containing ID cards for citizens registered to vote. The guards had intelligence that fake IDs would be given to foreigners paid to vote for the ruling party. Rather than dislodge the president by force, the guards would try to stop him rigging the election. One of them poured petrol on the pile, the other took out his lighter and set the heap ablaze.

It was one of several small steps that would culminate in the toppling of one of Africa’s strangest and most enduring dictators. …

DEGREE OF DIFFICULTY: Prepare to spend a while; it’s The Long Read.

WE MADE PLASTIC. WE DEPEND ON IT. NOW WE’RE DROWNING IN IT.

_{The miracle material has made modern life possible. But more than 40 percent of it is used just once, and it’s choking our waterways.}

_{Pictured above: Just after dawn in Kalyan, on the outskirts of Mumbai, India, trash pickers looking for plastics begin their daily rounds at the dump, joined by a flock of birds. In the distance, garbage trucks rolling in from the megacity traverse a garbage valley. The woman carrying the red cloth lives at the landfill.}

If plastic had been invented when the Pilgrims sailed from Plymouth, England, to North America—and the Mayflower had been stocked with bottled water and plastic-wrapped snacks—their plastic trash would likely still be around, four centuries later.

If the Pilgrims had been like many people today and simply tossed their empty bottles and wrappers over the side, Atlantic waves and sunlight would have worn all that plastic into tiny bits. And those bits might still be floating around the world’s oceans today, sponging up toxins to add to the ones already in them, waiting to be eaten by some hapless fish or oyster, and ultimately perhaps by one of us.

We should give thanks that the Pilgrims didn’t have plastic, I thought recently as I rode a train to Plymouth along England’s south coast. I was on my way to see a man who would help me make sense of the whole mess we’ve made with plastic, especially in the ocean.

_{After sheets of clear plastic trash have been washed in the Buriganga River, in Dhaka, Bangladesh, Noorjahan spreads them out to dry, turning them regularly— while also tending to her son, Momo. The plastic will eventually be sold to a recycler. Less than a fifth of all plastic gets recycled globally. In the U.S. it’s less than 10 percent.}

Because plastic wasn’t invented until the late 19th century, and production really only took off around 1950, we have a mere 9.2 billion tons of the stuff to deal with. Of that, more than 6.9 billion tons have become waste. And of that waste, a staggering 6.3 billion tons never made it to a recycling bin—a figure that stunned the scientists who crunched the numbers in 2017. …

_{Ed. YIKES! I can’t believe I bought this record 37 years ago.}

Take your medicine
Scented roses
One for the sake of it
Keep to small doses

Swallow it
Like a good girl
Swallow it
Like the fool you are
Swallow it
Like a good boy
Swallow it
Like the fool you are

You believe in anything
Put in front of your face
Watch the mass be served more trash
Up to my neck in garbage

Swallow it
Like a good girl
Swallow it
Like the fool you are
Swallow it
Like a good boy
Swallow it
Like the fool you are

Poisened personalities
Talking in household names
The package is the prize
That’s sure to catch your eye
And the contents taste the same

Swallow it
Like a good girl
Swallow it
Like the fool you are
Swallow it
Like a good boy
Swallow it
Like the fool you are

Like the fool you are
Like the fool you are

I ALWAYS LIKED Fad Gadget’s music, with it’s biting social commentary toward subjects such as machinery, industrialisation, consumerism, human sexuality, mass media, religion, domestic violence and dehumanization.

While looking for the video above, I stumbled across this documentary. Might be a barely uninteresting at all thing to watch…

Australia Finishes Building World’s Largest Cat-Proof Fence, Cats Accept the Challenge

Australia has completed the world’s longest cat-proof fence, because cats, an introduced species on the island continent, can be a huge freaking problem.

Agence France-Presse reports:

The Australian Wildlife Conservancy this month finished building and electrifying the 44-kilometre (27-mile) long fence to create a predator-free area of almost 9,400 hectares (23,200 acres) some 350 kilometres northwest of Alice Springs.

This area is about three times the size of a large airport, or the size of a town. The AWC will introduce native mammals into the area and plans to expand it by ten times beginning in 2020.

Before you get all sad, you should probably know that feral cats are an ecological disaster. As we’ve reported, a recent study found that cats have caused 63 bird, mammal, and reptile species to go extinct in the past 500 years. Another recent survey found that cats cover 99.8 percent of the Australian island, at an average density of one cat per two kilometer-by-two kilometer square. …

Video Goodnesses
_{and not-so-goodnesses}

Researchers created an amazing 3D map of a retina with imaging from the back of a mouse’s eye. Scientists crowdsourced the eye map with the help of online gamers. The resulting “museum” shows the features that process visuals are more complex than we’ve ever realized, even in animals with relatively simple eyes. By turning the data into a game, researchers were able to discover six new type of cells that could help scientists discover better AI.

Forget cryptocurrencies. These are cryptocollectibles.

誕生日の夜のお祝いディナー。The celebration dinner of the birthday.

_{Ed. If you haven’t been paying attention, Maru turned 11 this week.}

Max trimming a nice fesh maple tree branch.

We can be a friend.

FINALLY . . .

Photos: All the scariest natural disasters are happening at once

_{DEEP BREATH}

_{Cue toxic steam cloud. Click to embiggen.}

Nature has strange, sudden, and often terrifying ways of reminding us of the precariousness of life on Earth. Over the past several weeks, a series of startling natural events have produced terrifying images, from Hawaii’s Mt. Kilauea eruption to a crack in the continent of Africa.

With renewed gratitude for the human race’s continued existence, here’s a look back:

Mt. Kilauea poured out lava from 22 fissures across Hawaii’s Big Island, setting homes ablaze and spewing toxic gas.

_{Jack Jones, visiting from Madison, Wis., takes pictures at a country club in Volcano, Hawaii on May 21.}

_{A massive fast moving lava flow consumes everything in its path on May 19.}

A crack began to form in east Africa, that will eventually split the continent in two.

This photo was taken several weeks ago, but we’re guessing the crack is still there.

_{A tanker drives near a chasm suspected to have been caused by a heavy downpour along an underground fault-line near the Rift Valley town of Mai-Mahiu, Kenya on March 28.}

…

_{Ed. More tomorrow? Probably. Possibly. Maybe. Not?}