Month: September 2021

In a move that we’re certain was part of her “legal strategy”, jury selection in the upcoming Elizabeth Holmes trial could wind up becoming “complicated” as a result of the founder’s claims of being abused by the company’s COO, Sunny Balwani.

Legal experts told Reuters that in-person questioning of up to 170 jurors is set to start Tuesday, out of more than 200 who have filled out questionnaires. Meanwhile, lawyers for Holmes have undoubtedly “combed through potential jurors’ social media posts for their views about abuse” in advance of questioning. 

According to the report, 33 potential jurors have already been excused after admitting potential bias. 

Christina Marinakis, a jury consultant with IMS, said jurors may be reluctant to admit that abuse may be used as an “excuse” in court. “They may fear they are going to be looked at as misogynists,” she said.

Holmes’ lawyers may favor younger jurors, another jury consultant said, “especially women”.

Recall, days ago, we noted that Holmes would argue she had PTSD as a result of years of abuse. Facing 20 years in prison, Holmes’ lawyers have told the court they expect Holmes to testify in her own defense during her trial. Holmes and Balwani have both been charged, but their trials have been separated.

Holmes now claims she “suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder, depression and anxiety as a result of her relationship with Balwani”, Bloomberg reported. Court filings have revealed that Holmes’ lawyers plan “to introduce evidence that Mr. Balwani verbally disparaged her and withdrew ‘affection if she displeased him,’ controlled what she ate, how she dressed, how much money she could spend, who she could interact with — essentially dominating her and erasing her capacity to make decisions.”

Holmes’ defense will argue that Balwani was “monitoring her calls, text messages and emails; physical violence, such as throwing hard, sharp objects at her; restricting her sleep; monitoring her movements; and insisting that any success she had was because of him.”

Balwani has denied such allegations, and his lawyers have argued to have their trials seperate because “Ms. Holmes’s evidence seeking to establish her innocence would require him to defend against not only the government’s case, but to defend against her allegations as well because her allegations are so inflammatory that they cannot be left unrebutted before the jury.”

Everyone has seen some version of the following chart which shows that a year and a half after the covid pandemic first struck, airline traffic as measured by TSA traveler throughput is roughly at 80% of where it should be.

But what the chart above fails to distinguish is the chasm that has opened up between regular “coach” travel and business class.

A new study from the American Hotel & Lodging Association (AHLA) found that the rising number of COVID-19 cases associated with the Delta variant has caused business travelers to plan fewer trips.

According to the survey conducted by Morning Consult, 67 percent of business travelers are planning to take fewer trips, 52 percent are likely to cancel existing travel plans without rescheduling and 60 percent expect to postpone existing travel plans.  Meanwhile, another 66 percent of respondents are likely to only travel to places they can drive.

As Travel Pulse notes, while leisure travel has seen an uptick over the summer, the long-term outlook of business travel and events is not expected to return to pre-pandemic levels until 2024 at the earliest. As a result, hotels are expected to end 2021 down nearly 500,000 jobs compared to 2019.

“Hotels were already on pace to lose more business travel revenue this year than we did in 2020,” AHLA CEO Chip Rogers said. “And now rising COVID-19 cases threaten to further reduce the main source of revenue for our industry.”

“Hotel employees and small business owners across the nation have been pleading for direct pandemic relief for over a year now,” Rogers continued. “These results show why now is the time for Congress to listen to those calls and pass the Save Hotel Jobs Act.”

Travelers likely to attend large gatherings, meetings and events were also interviewed, with 71 percent saying they would attend fewer in-person events due to coronavirus concerns and 67 percent likely to have shorter meetings or events.

The study also found that 59 percent of respondents are likely to postpone existing meetings or events until a later date, while another 49 percent said they are likely to cancel existing meetings or events with no plans to reschedule.

The news is devastating for most airlines who make the bulk of their profits on business class travel, which coach is often breakeven if not a cost. Alas, in a world where most business interactions have shifted to zoom calls, this is the new reality of airlines.

The silver lining: it is only a matter of time before airlines have no choice but to slash prices for business and first class until they find an appropriate level of unsubsidized demand that ends up filling said classes.

By Emel Akan of The Epoch Times

As the world watches events in Afghanistan unfold, many have started to wonder what the Taliban rule means for the future of the country’s opium production.

Afghanistan is the world’s largest producer of the opium poppy, which is the raw material for heroin, one of the world’s deadliest drugs. The country accounted for nearly 83 percent of global opium production between 2015 and 2020, according to estimates of the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC). And it’s a key supplier for heroin markets across Europe and Asia.

The U.S. military presence failed to curtail opium production throughout the Afghan countryside. For two decades, opiate economy, which includes cultivation of the poppy, processing into heroin, and trafficking, has been a major source of cash for Afghanistan.

Despite its anti-heroin rhetoric, the Taliban has benefited greatly from this opium poppy economy and become a major player in the world’s drug trade.

In its first official press conference in Kabul, the Taliban pledged to end opium cultivation in Afghanistan, in an effort to gain acceptance from the international community.

“Today, when we entered Kabul, we saw a large number of our youth who was sitting under the bridges or next to the walls and they were using narcotics. This was so unfortunate,” Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid told reporters on Aug. 17.

“From now on, Afghanistan will be a narcotics-free country, but it needs international assistance,” he said, adding that foreign aid is needed to help Afghan farmers switch to alternative crops.

Afghanistan is noted for its high-quality fruits including pomegranates, grapes, and melons. Various international organizations in the past have helped Afghan families grow pomegranates, for example, as an important alternative to opium.

Despite its agriculture sector and rich mineral resources, the country has been critically dependent on foreign aid, which has dried up with the Taliban takeover.

International donors had been providing 75 percent of the Afghan government’s operating budget, Vanda Felbab-Brown, director of the Initiative on Nonstate Armed Actors at the Brookings Institution, wrote in a Chatham House report.

The Biden administration froze nearly $9 billion in Afghan government reserves that were held in the United States. The International Monetary Fund also blocked Afghanistan from receiving nearly $440 million in funds that were scheduled to be sent earlier. And the German government announced a suspension of $300 million in development aid budgeted for this year.

Financial sanctions will also make it difficult for international organizations to provide humanitarian aid to Afghan families.

Hence, the country is expected to drift into a humanitarian and financial crisis soon, according to experts, which may lead the new regime to increase illicit activities, including drug trafficking.

“The immediate effects of the financial squeeze in place is that cash liquidity in Afghanistan may drop, which will drive up inflation—including food prices—while disadvantaging Afghanistan’s poorest and the hundreds of thousands of internally displaced people,” Felbab-Brown wrote.

As in the past, she noted, those who attempt to ban poppy cultivation in rural areas can “find themselves facing significant losses of political capital and violent opposition.”

Gretchen Peters, executive director at the Center on Illicit Networks and Transnational Organized Crime, believes the Taliban shouldn’t be trusted when it comes to its promises to eradicate the poppy trade.

“They pulled a maneuver like that back in the ’90s. They did actually succeed in banning farmers from growing poppy for a year,” she told NPR.

“But the secret was the Taliban were actually sitting on these huge, vast stores of opium. The price of opium went through the roof, and they sold it and made a lot more money than they had the year previous.”

According to Peters, the Taliban will now have full access to the capacities and institutions of state, including its banking system, airlines, and border crossings, which would make its drug trafficking a lot easier.

Recently, poppy cultivation has expanded in most regions of the country, soaring 37 percent in the past year alone, according to UNODC.

Authored by Pepe Escobar via The Saker and first posted at AsiaTimes (emphasis ours),

It was 20 years ago today. Asia Times published Get Osama! Now! Or Else…The rest is history.

Retrospectively, this sounds like news from another galaxy. Before Planet 9/11. Before GWOT (Global War on Terror). Before the Forever Wars. Before the social network era. Before the Russia-China strategic partnership. Before the Dronification of State Violence. Before techno-feudalism.

Allow me to get a little personal. I was back in Peshawar – the Islamic Rome, capital of the tribal areas – 20 years ago after a dizzying loop around Pakistan, tribal territory, a botched smuggling op to Kunar, biding time in Tajikistan, arriving by Soviet helicopter in the Panjshir valley, a harrowing road trip to Faizabad, and a UN flight that took ages to arrive.

In the Panjshir, I had finally met “the Lion”, commander Masoud, then plotting a counter-offensive against the Taliban. He told me he was fighting a triad: the Taliban, al-Qaeda and the Pakistani ISI. Less than three weeks later he was assassinated – by two al-Qaeda ops disguised as a camera crew, two days before 9/11.

No one, 20 years ago, could possibly imagine the subsequent slings and arrows of outrageous – terror – fortune. Two decades, $2.3 trillion and at least 240,000 Afghan deaths later, the Taliban are back where they were: ruling Afghanistan. Masoud Jr in theory leads a “resistance” in the Panjshir – actually a CIA ops channeled through CIA asset Amrullah Saleh, former Afghan Vice-President.

Al-Qaeda is a harmless skeleton, even rehabilitated in Syria as “moderate rebels; the new bogeyman in town is ISIS-K, a spin-off of the Islamic State in “Syraq”.

After negotiating a stunning package deal with the Taliban, the Empire of Chaos is concluding a humiliating evacuation from the land it bombed into democracy and submitted for two decades. Once again the US was de facto expelled by a peasant guerrilla army, this time mostly consisting of Pashtuns, descendants of the White Huns – a nomad confederation – as well as the Sakas, nomadic Iranic peoples of the Eurasian steppes.

The CIA shadow army

ISIS-K, the new viper’s nest, opens multiple Pandora boxes that may lead to the new incarnation of the Forever Wars. ISIS-K has claimed responsibility for the horrific Kabul suicide bombing.

ISIS-K is apparently led by one ghostly emir Shahab al-Mujahir (no photo, no biography details), supposed to be an urban warfare expert who previously worked as a mere mid-level commander for the Haqqani network.

In 2020 media-savvy ISIS-K released one of his audio messages in Pashto. Yet he may not be Pashtun, but actually from some latitude in the Middle East, and not fluent in the language.

Even CENTCOM commander Gen Mackenzie has admitted that the US military are sharing intel on ISIS-K with the Taliban – or rather vice-versa: Taliban spokesman Zahibullah Mujahid in Kabul stressed that they warned the Americans in the first place about an imminent threat to the airport.

The Pentagon-Taliban collaboration is by now established. The perennial CIA shadow wars are a completely different ball game.

I have shown in this in-depth investigation how the top priority for the Taliban is to target the ramifications of the CIA shadow army in Afghanistan, deployed via the Khost Protection Force (KPF) and inside the National Directorate of Security (NDS).

The CIA army, as I explain, was a two-headed hydra. Older units harked back to 2001 and were very close to the CIA. The most powerful was the KPF, based at the CIA’s Camp Chapman in Khost, which operated totally outside Afghan law, not to mention budget.

The other head of the hydra were the NDS’s own Afghan Special Forces: four main units, each operating in its own regional area. The NDS was funded by the CIA and for all practical purposes, operatives were trained and weaponized by the CIA.

So the NDS was a de facto CIA proxy. And here we have the direct connection to Saleh, who was trained by the CIA in the US when the Taliban was in power in the late 1990s. Afterwards, Saleh became the head of the NDS – which happened to work very closely with RAW, Indian intel. Now he’s a “resistance leader” in the Panjshir.

My investigation was confirmed right away by the deployment of Task Force Pineapple last week, an operation carried out by CIA/Special Forces to extract the last sensitive intel assets from Kabul who were being chased by the Taliban.

In parallel, serious questions are piling up regarding the Kabul suicide bombing and the immediate MQ-9 Reaper response targeting an “ISIS-K planner” in eastern Afghanistan.

This page has been carefully tracking prime information regarding what could be described as the Abbey Gate Massacre, not surprisingly buried by Western mainstream media.

The You Tube channel Kabul Lovers, for instance, is engaging in street-level journalism that puts to shame every multi-million dollar TV network. A military officer who examined the bodies of many of the bombing victims at Kabul Emergency Hospital claimed that most were not victims of the suicide bombing: “All victims were killed by American bullets, except maybe 20 people out of 100.” The full, original report, in Dari, is here.

Scott Ritter, for his part, has emphasized the need of “perspective” on the claimed drone strike against ISIS-K “from an actual drone expert like Daniel Hale, but they put him in jail for telling the truth about how bad our drone program actually is when it comes to killing the right people.”

By now it’s established that contrary to Pentagon claims, the drone strike hit a random house in Jalalabad, not a moving vehicle, and there was “collateral damage”: at least 3 civilians.

And the civilian death toll of a subsequent missile strike on another alleged “ISIS-K planner” in a car in Kabul is already at 9 – including 6 children.

The Syria-Afghanistan rat line

The much-lauded Pentagon offensive against ISIS in “Syraq” has been derided all across the Axis of Resistance as a massive farce.

Over the years, we have had exposés coming from Moscow; Tehran; Damascus; Hezbollah; and some of the People’s Mobilization Units (PMUs) in Iraq.

Hezbollah’s secretary-general Hassan Nasrallah has repeatedly asserted how “the US have been using helicopters to save ISIS terrorists from complete annihilation in Iraq/Syria and transporting them to Afghanistan to keep them as insurgents in Central Asia against Russia, China and Iran.”

The extremely well informed Russian Special Presidential Envoy for Afghanistan, Zamir Kabulov, has pointed out that Russia had received the same information from local tribal leaders. Even former President Hamid Karzai – now a key negotiator forming the next Taliban-led government in Kabul – has branded ISIS-K a “tool” of the United States.

It’s important to remember that ISIS-K has become much more powerful in Afghanistan since 2020 because of what I describe as a shadowy transportation ratline from Idlib in Syria to Kunar and Nangarhar in eastern Afghanistan.

Of course there is no smoking gun – yet: but what we do have is a serious working hypothesis that ISIS-K may be just another CIA shadow army, in collaboration with the NDS.

All that, if confirmed, would point to a dark future: the continuation of the Forever Wars by other means – and tactics. Yet never underestimate the counter-power of those no-nonsense descendants of White Huns and Sakas.

In case there was any doubt that new waves of hackers wreaking havoc around the world are often working in China’s best interest, look no further than Australia.

After the country’s relationship with China recently soured, it suffered from “wave after wave” of cyberattack, according to a new Bloomberg report.

The incidents started in April 2020 when Chinese bots “swarmed” Australian government networks after Prime Minister Scott Morrison called for an independent investigation into Covid’s origins. The bots undertook a “massive and noisy attack” with little attempt to hide what they were doing. 

“It was just a door knock, like someone walking up and ringing your doorbell,” said Robert Potter, chief executive officer of Internet 2.0, an Australian cybersecurity firm.

Following Morrison’s call, Australia dealt with “months of active hacks” at places like the parliamentary email network, the Bureau of Meteorology and the departments of defense and health.

Beijing denied involvement but experts tracked much of the activity to “systems used by China-based advanced persistent threat groups”, Bloomberg reported.

Potter continued: “China’s cyber reach is detectable on almost every government server. It isn’t subtle and it increases and decreases in a way that correlates to our overall relationship.” 

The campaign against Australia was one of the largest seen across the world over the last year, despite ubiquitous hacks, cracks and ransomware attacks that took place globally over the last 12 to 18 months.

It prompted Australia to announce in June 2020 that a “state-based cyber actor” was “targeting Australian organizations across a range of sectors, including all levels of government, industry,” the report says.

“There are not a large number of state-based actors that can engage in this type of activity,” Morrison said, alluding to China. China, of course, denied the allegations, stating: “Australian government and media have wrongly accused China of hacking many times before based on insufficient evidence.”

Australia’s director-general of security, Mike Burgess, didn’t seem too keen on placing blame on China, stating of the espionage. “we all do it”.

He said on Sky News back in March: “If I’m pointing my finger at you accusing you of espionage, I’ve got three fingers pointing back at me. Sometimes, though, it is right that governments do it because someone’s overstepped a line — it’s not just the theft of a military secret, it’s something else more offensive to our nation or damaging to our nation. And that’s the judgement governments are best placed to make.”

Meanwhile, China has accused Australia of pandering to Washington, and has quietly started to threaten Australia with the $16 billion in revenue it brought to the continent in 2019. 

Ambassador Cheng Jingye said: “It is up to the people to decide. Maybe the ordinary people will say “Why should we drink Australian wine? Eat Australian beef?”

Hugh White, a former intelligence official who is now an emeritus professor of strategic studies at the Australian National University, told Bloomberg: “China’s treatment of Australia has been distinctive if not unique. I haven’t been able to identify another country that had pressure placed on it over such a broad range of areas.”

White continued: “The Chinese have been eager to look for the opportunity to show the rest of Asia what’s at stake as they make their decisions about how they position themselves in relation to the US and China. Australia is the perfect victim for that.”

You can read Bloomberg’s full report here. 

The Taliban has announced it plans to have Kabul’s international airport up and running again within a mere “days”. This just as Washington has formally declared its 20-year long war and occupation “over”. 

Senior Taliban leader Anas Haqqani told Al Jazeera at around the same time that the last American military plane departed Hamid Karzai International Airport overnight that “We are ready to resume the airport’s operation. We will do it within days.”

In the statements he also called the US forces exit from the country a “great” event and said it was a “historical” day. 

Immediately after the last US military transport plane departed, Taliban fighters could be seen walking around and inspecting hangars where American Chinook helicopters were left behind, though US officials were widely cited as saying they and other aircraft left at Kabul airport had been “disabled” before the US departed.

The Taliban were seen celebrating into the night while flaunting American military uniforms and gear and posing for photographs.

The Taliban fighters celebrated their victory by raising their gloved fists and American weapons in the air, chanting “Takbir” and “Zendabar.”

20 years of American occupation in Afghanistan reached the end of a chapter. https://t.co/BmS2T6rAI7 pic.twitter.com/wSEMDWR0ro

— Marcus Yam 文火 (@yamphoto) August 31, 2021

Additionally, Haqqani told Al Jazeera that “The government will take shape in the following few days.” The report said further:

In a tweet following the US withdrawal, Haqqani said that “we made history again. The 20-year occupation of Afghanistan by the United States and NATO ended tonight.”

Haqqani had told Al Jazeera in an earlier interview that the overall aims of the new government will be “to maintain and be faithful to what we are fighting for. To serve the Afghan people and to serve Islam”.

#Afghan Air force planes, including A29 Super Tucanos and MD 530s helicopters. Some of the #Taliban‘s haul after #US withdrawal. Many seem to have been disabled. pic.twitter.com/aqV31dKX7v

— Nabih (@nabihbulos) August 31, 2021

“We have covered about 90 to 95 percent and we will announce the final outcome in the following few days,” he said of the new Taliban rule, though noted it remains too early to name who will be part of the cabinet.