3:39 PM 7/24/2020 - Coronavirus in brooklyn: The Church Deacon Died of Covid-19. Then His Body Went Missing. 24/07/20 12:42

3:39 PM 7/24/2020

Saved Stories – In 50 Brief Posts – http://feed.informer.com/share/XFTYOYWW0M

» Saved Stories - None: Google Alert - Coronavirus in brooklyn: The Church Deacon Died of Covid-19. Then His Body Went Missing.
24/07/20 12:42 from Saved Stories from Michael_Novakhov (1 sites)
Thirteen days later, his body was found in the back of an unrefrigerated U-Haul truck, parked on a busy Brooklyn street in front of a Dollar General and ... Google Alert - Coronavirus in brooklyn Saved Stories - None

» Saved Stories - None: Google Alert - coronavirus in israel: France: Those traveling from Israel must be tested for COVID-19
24/07/20 12:42 from Saved Stories from Michael_Novakhov (1 sites)
PARIS - People arriving from 16 countries outside the European Union where the infection rate of COVID -19 is deemed to be high will be subject to ... Google Alert - coronavirus in israel Saved Stories - None

» Saved Stories - None: Google Alert - coronavirus origins: Tracing the transmission rates and origins of SARS-CoV-2 strains circulating in Brazil
24/07/20 12:41 from Saved Stories from Michael_Novakhov (1 sites)
Brazil, like the United States, has taken a hands-off approach in dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic. Like the U.S., the country has a leader who has ... Google Alert - coronavirus origins Saved Stories - None

» Saved Stories - None: Google Alert - coronavirus in italy: Italy imposes quarantine on travellers from Romania, Bulgaria
24/07/20 12:40 from Saved Stories from Michael_Novakhov (1 sites)
Italy , one of the European countries worst-affected by the novel coronavirus , had already banned entry to people coming from 16 countries including ... Google Alert - coronavirus in italy Saved Stories - None

» Saved Stories - None: Google Alert - Coronavirus in brooklyn: The Latest: Germany to test for coronavirus at airports
24/07/20 12:40 from Saved Stories from Michael_Novakhov (1 sites)
BERLIN — German authorities plan to set up testing stations at airports to prod people arriving from high-risk countries to get tested for the coronavirus  ... Google Alert - Coronavirus in brooklyn Saved Stories - None

» Saved Stories - None: Google Alert - covid-19 in meat plants workers: The Daily 202: As US economy careens toward coronavirus cliffs, Trump looks to give FBI a new ...
24/07/20 12:37 from Saved Stories from Michael_Novakhov (1 sites)
Sandra Cruz, who lost her job because of the coronavirus pandemic and fell ... administration pushes the industry to develop and manufacture covid - 19 ... (Los Angeles Times); Workers at a meat plant in Pennsylvania are suing the ....

» Saved Stories - None: Google Alert - Sars-Cov-2 in Livestock: We don't even choose 'herd immunity' for livestock
24/07/20 12:36 from Saved Stories from Michael_Novakhov (1 sites)
An adequate level of herd immunity against COVID-19 requires 60% to 70% of the world to become infected and — here's the hard part — survive ... Google Alert - Sars-Cov-2 in Livestock Saved Stories - None

» Saved Stories - None: Coronavirus Live Updates: C.D.C. Issues New Schools Guidance
24/07/20 11:37 from Saved Stories from Michael_Novakhov (1 sites)
A new C.D.C. statement on schools calls for reopening and downplays the potential health risks. The top U.S. public health agency issued a full-throated call to reopen schools in a package of new “resources and tools” posted ...

» Saved Stories - None: FOX News: Robert E. Lee statue, eight Confederate busts removed from Virginia Capitol
24/07/20 11:19 from Saved Stories from Michael_Novakhov (1 sites)
A life-size statue of General Robert E. Lee along with the busts of eight of his Confederate colleagues were removed from Virginia's Capitol late Thursday and early Friday. FOX News Saved Stories - None

» Saved Stories - None: "fbi" - Google News: FBI warns US companies about backdoors in Chinese tax software - ZDNet
24/07/20 11:18 from Saved Stories from Michael_Novakhov (1 sites)
FBI warns US companies about backdoors in Chinese tax software    ZDNet "fbi" - Google News Saved Stories - None

» Saved Stories - None: The National Interest: Random Sampling Suggests COVID-19 Is 6 Times Deadlier Than Flu
24/07/20 11:18 from Saved Stories from Michael_Novakhov (1 sites)
Nir Menachemi Public Health, North America From April 25 to May 1, our team randomly selected and tested thousands of Indiana residents, no matter if they’d been sick or not. From this testing we were able to get some of the first truly ...

» Saved Stories - None: The National Interest: 95 Percent Casualties: Why It Was So Hard to Stop the Nazis From Laying Siege to Leningrad
24/07/20 11:17 from Saved Stories from Michael_Novakhov (1 sites)
Warfare History Network History, Europe The battle lasted years and killed millions. Key Point:  The Soviets would lose an entire army when trying to save the city. In fact, multiple offensives would fail, although eventually Moscow woul...

» Saved Stories - None: "fbi" - Google News: FBI: Illegal Attempts to Buy Guns Skyrocketed When Coronavirus Pandemic Began - Officer
24/07/20 11:17 from Saved Stories from Michael_Novakhov (1 sites)
FBI: Illegal Attempts to Buy Guns Skyrocketed When Coronavirus Pandemic Began    Officer "fbi" - Google News Saved Stories - None

» Saved Stories - None: The National Interest: Wrecked: How Churchill's Mini-Subs Destroyed Hitler's Battleship Tirpitz
24/07/20 11:16 from Saved Stories from Michael_Novakhov (1 sites)
Warfare History Network History, Europe The difficult operation paid off for London and caused much anguish in Berlin. Key point:  The battleship was injured by mulitple mini-submarines. Shortly thereafter, the Royal Navy's carriers sent...

» Saved Stories - None: Defense One - All Content: The November Election Is Going to Be a Mess
24/07/20 11:16 from Saved Stories from Michael_Novakhov (1 sites)
Disaster is avoidable—if lawmakers act now. Defense One - All Content Saved Stories - None

» Saved Stories - None: Security Boulevard: What Twitter Attack Says on Human Nature, Social Engineering
24/07/20 11:15 from Saved Stories from Michael_Novakhov (1 sites)
Last week, Twitter suffered a breach that led to the compromise of numerous high-profile accounts, including those of Barak Obama, Joe Biden, Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk. I took the opportunity to speak with Nir... The post What Twitter Att...

» Saved Stories - None: "cia" - Google News: LIPSON: A Put-Up Job: The FBI, CIA, Mueller, and Schiff Investigate Trump-Russia Collusion - Yall Politics
24/07/20 11:15 from Saved Stories from Michael_Novakhov (1 sites)
LIPSON: A Put-Up Job: The FBI, CIA, Mueller, and Schiff Investigate Trump-Russia Collusion    Yall Politics "cia" - Google News Saved Stories - None

» Saved Stories - None: Just Security: The President’s Private Army
24/07/20 11:14 from Saved Stories from Michael_Novakhov (1 sites)
It doesn’t take a legal expert to know that what’s happening in Portland, Oregon is an abuse of power. When unidentified federal forces dressed as soldiers pull people off the streets into unmarked vans, something is gravely wrong. What’...

» Saved Stories - None: "cia" - Google News: Don’t Rush to Judge the CIA’s Covert Cyber Offensive - World Politics Review
24/07/20 11:14 from Saved Stories from Michael_Novakhov (1 sites)
Don’t Rush to Judge the CIA’s Covert Cyber Offensive    World Politics Review "cia" - Google News Saved Stories - None

» Saved Stories - None: "fbi" - Google News: Inside the San Antonio FBI - WOAI
24/07/20 11:14 from Saved Stories from Michael_Novakhov (1 sites)
Inside the San Antonio FBI    WOAI "fbi" - Google News Saved Stories - None

» Saved Stories - None: "International Security" - Google News: Will NATO still be relevant in the future? - Atlantic Council
24/07/20 11:13 from Saved Stories from Michael_Novakhov (1 sites)
Will NATO still be relevant in the future?    Atlantic Council "International Security" - Google News Saved Stories - None

» Saved Stories - None: The National Interest: Pandemic Problem: Trump’s Historical Mistake Dooms His Reelection Prospects
24/07/20 11:13 from Saved Stories from Michael_Novakhov (1 sites)
Amitai Etzioni Politics, Americas The president prioritized the economy over his people—and he will pay for that at the polls. Social scientists like myself tend to play down the role of personalities in history, instead paying more mind...

» Saved Stories - None: "International Security" - Google News: Who’s afraid of China’s big bad wolf warriors? - The Australian
24/07/20 11:12 from Saved Stories from Michael_Novakhov (1 sites)
Who’s afraid of China’s big bad wolf warriors?    The Australian "International Security" - Google News Saved Stories - None

» Saved Stories - None: Window on Eurasia -- New Series: Kremlin Now Using Third-Party Lawsuits to Bankrupt Those who Oppose It, Agora Report Says
24/07/20 11:12 from Saved Stories from Michael_Novakhov (1 sites)
Paul Goble             Staunton, July 22 – The Kremlin has found a new wave to go after its political opponents: using suits by third parties to bankrupt and thus hobble them, even a...

» Saved Stories - None: "russia" - Google News: Russia c.bank chief gives online press conference after rate decision - Reuters UK
24/07/20 11:11 from Saved Stories from Michael_Novakhov (1 sites)
Russia c.bank chief gives online press conference after rate decision    Reuters UK "russia" - Google News Saved Stories - None

» Saved Stories - None: "Turkey and Russia" - Google News: Is Erdogan’s ability to turn superpower rivalry to advantage diminishing? - Al-Monitor
24/07/20 11:11 from Saved Stories from Michael_Novakhov (1 sites)
Is Erdogan’s ability to turn superpower rivalry to advantage diminishing?    Al-Monitor "Turkey and Russia" - Google News Saved Stories - None

» Saved Stories - None: Europe: Germany to beef up financial regulation after Wirecard scandal
24/07/20 11:10 from Saved Stories from Michael_Novakhov (1 sites)
BaFin will be given ‘sovereign powers’ to intervene directly in public companies Europe Saved Stories - None

» Saved Stories - None: Europe: Restrictions return in Spain as coronavirus infections spike again
24/07/20 11:10 from Saved Stories from Michael_Novakhov (1 sites)
Outbreaks trace to seasonal farm work, family gatherings and nightclubs — with 100 cases linked to one party setting. Europe Saved Stories - None

» Saved Stories - None: Chechen leader Kadyrov announces retaliatory sanctions on US secretary of state after Washington targets his family
24/07/20 10:33 from Saved Stories from Michael_Novakhov (1 sites)
The head of Chechnya has announced the imposition of “all the sanctions in the republic” against US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. Ramzan Kadyrov says it’s in response to Washington’s latest measures against his relatives. On July 20, t...

» Saved Stories - None: Germany, seeking independence from U.S., pushes cyber security research
24/07/20 10:26 from Saved Stories from Michael_Novakhov (1 sites)
FILE PHOTO: A German flag is seen on the laptop screen in front of a computer screen on which cyber code is displayed, in this illustration picture taken March 2, 2018. REUTERS/Kacper Pempel/Illustration BERLIN (Reuters) - Germany announ...

» Saved Stories - None: Germany: New cyber command 'will take action' against cyber attacks - DefMin - YouTube
24/07/20 10:23 from Saved Stories from Michael_Novakhov (1 sites)
Germany: New cyber command 'will take action' against cyber attacks - DefMin Saved Stories - None

» Saved Stories - None: 9:10 AM 7/24/2020 - COVID-19 and Bioweapons Research | Coronavirus and cybercrime: Germany assumes EU presidency with strong focus on cybersecurity | America ranked among worst countries to raise a family, study says
24/07/20 09:18 from Saved Stories from Michael_Novakhov (1 sites)
July 24, 2020 9:10 AM 7/24/2020   JULY 24, 2020 COVID-19 and Bioweapons Research by   SEIJI YAMADA Facebook Twitter Reddit Email The anthrax attacks of 2001 were carried out via mail. Anthrax was sent via the US Postal Service ...

» Saved Stories - None: Google Alert - sars cov 2 as bioweapon: COVID-19 and Bioweapons Research
24/07/20 09:00 from Saved Stories from Michael_Novakhov (1 sites)
The anthrax attacks of 2001 were carried out via mail. Anthrax was sent via the US Postal Service to members of Congress and media executives ... Google Alert - sars cov 2 as bioweapon Saved Stories - None

» Saved Stories - None: Google Alert - Coronavirus and US Military: The New Cold War Heats Up
24/07/20 08:59 from Saved Stories from Michael_Novakhov (1 sites)
The build up of US -Nato forces continues unabated around the Black Sea and ... biggest coronavirus outbreak within the U.S. military anywhere in the world . . . [on July 16] U.S. Forces Japan confirmed another 36 infections among ....

» Saved Stories - None: The evidence supports the ability of dogs and cats to seroconvert when living as pets in a COVID-19 positive household and in regions with high burden of human disease.news-medical.net/news/20200724/…
24/07/20 08:58 from Saved Stories from Michael_Novakhov (1 sites)
The evidence supports the ability of dogs and cats to seroconvert when living as pets in a COVID-19 positive household and in regions with high burden of human disease. news-medical.net/news/20200724/… Posted by mikenov on Friday, July 2...

» Saved Stories - None: “This is the largest study to investigate SARS-CoV-2 in companion animals to date. We found that companion animals living in areas of high human infection can become infected.”news-medical.net/news/20200724/…
24/07/20 08:58 from Saved Stories from Michael_Novakhov (1 sites)
“This is the largest study to investigate SARS-CoV-2 in companion animals to date. We found that companion animals living in areas of high human infection can become infected.” news-medical.net/news/20200724/… Posted by mikenov on Friday...

» Saved Stories - None: The researchers say that pets are unlikely to be an important route of viral spread, but when animals are present at high density, as on mink breeding farms, the virus may spread from animals to humans more readily.news-medical.net
24/07/20 08:57 from Saved Stories from Michael_Novakhov (1 sites)
The researchers say that pets are unlikely to be an important route of viral spread, but when animals are present at high density, as on mink breeding farms, the virus may spread from animals to humans more readily. news-medical.net/news...

» Saved Stories - None: RT @FFRAFAction: German Jewish leaders fear rise of antisemitic conspiracy theories linked to Covid-19 theguardian.com/world/2020/jul…
24/07/20 08:57 from Saved Stories from Michael_Novakhov (1 sites)
German Jewish leaders fear rise of antisemitic conspiracy theories linked to Covid-19 theguardian.com/world/2020/jul… Posted by FFRAFAction on Friday, July 24th, 2020 10:47am Retweeted by mikenov on Friday, July 24th, 2020 10:49am 7 like...

» Saved Stories - None: RT @PostOpinions: Trump has demonstrated that it is possible to hollow out and manipulate even the institutions of the United States to ser…
24/07/20 08:56 from Saved Stories from Michael_Novakhov (1 sites)
Trump has demonstrated that it is possible to hollow out and manipulate even the institutions of the United States to serve one individual’s personal interests, writes @justicemalala wapo.st/3jzqbeY Posted by PostOpinions on Friday, July...

» Saved Stories - None: Google Alert - Covid-19 blood clots: Why COVID-19 is killing US diabetes patients at alarming rates
24/07/20 08:56 from Saved Stories from Michael_Novakhov (1 sites)
Clark, a financial systems analyst, died April 6 from a blood clot in the lungs. Osojnicki is among 255 recorded deaths in Minnesota of people with COVID  ... Google Alert - Covid-19 blood clots Saved Stories - None

» Saved Stories - None: Google Alert - Coronavirus and cyber attacks: Coronavirus and cybercrime: Germany assumes EU presidency with strong focus on cybersecurity
24/07/20 08:53 from Saved Stories from Michael_Novakhov (1 sites)
Data privacy, IoT security , and closer co-operation among member states also on the agenda. Germany's EU presidency started in July 2020, with a ... Google Alert - Coronavirus and cyber attacks Saved Stories - None

» Saved Stories - None: Google Alert - gastrointestinal coronavirus: A Doctor Who Specializes in Long-Term COVID-19 Effects Is Alarmed by What He Sees
24/07/20 08:52 from Saved Stories from Michael_Novakhov (1 sites)
For thousands of Americans, a coronavirus diagnosis was only the ... the lungs, gastrointestinal tract, heart, kidneys, liver, brain, and nervous system. Google Alert - gastrointestinal coronavirus Saved Stories - None

» Saved Stories - None: Google Alert - Covid-19: genetic studies: Coronavirus heart threat: 10-to-30 percent of those hospitalized end up with 'molecular damage'
24/07/20 08:51 from Saved Stories from Michael_Novakhov (1 sites)
More than six months into the global pandemic, studies have shown that COVID - 19 can not only exacerbate existing heart problems, but could also ... Google Alert - Covid-19: genetic studies Saved Stories - None

» Saved Stories - None: Google Alert - coronavirus herd immunity: WHO chief scientist sees no herd immunity to COVID-19 yet
24/07/20 08:49 from Saved Stories from Michael_Novakhov (1 sites)
Herd immunity is usually achieved through vaccination and occurs when most of a population is immune to a disease, blocking its continued spread. Google Alert - coronavirus herd immunity Saved Stories - None

» Saved Stories - None: Google Alert - coronavirus in israel: Israel records over 1800 fresh COVID-19 infections
24/07/20 08:49 from Saved Stories from Michael_Novakhov (1 sites)
JERUSALEM. Israel on Friday confirmed another 1,889 cases infected with the novel coronavirus . According to the Health Ministry, the total count of ... Google Alert - coronavirus in israel Saved Stories - None

» Saved Stories - None: Explained: How ‘corona’ of the virus changes into a hairpin shape — and why
24/07/20 08:21 from Saved Stories from Michael_Novakhov (1 sites)
Written by Kabir Firaque | New Delhi | Updated: July 24, 2020 10:45:13 am Structure of SARS-CoV-2, including the spike protein. (Source: Wikipedia) The spike protein of SARS-CoV-2 — the ‘corona’ in the coronavirus that ...

» Saved Stories - None: 7:47 AM 7/24/2020 - Saved Stories - Disease X-19
24/07/20 07:51 from Saved Stories from Michael_Novakhov (1 sites)
July 24, 2020 7:47 AM 7/24/2020 Saved Stories - Disease X-19 ________________________________________________________________________ - Saved Stories - Disease X-19   Google Alert - coronavirus origins: Watch Now: Stricter COVID-19 ...

» Saved Stories - None: 6:59 AM 7/24/2020 - "3.4% of dogs and 3.9% of cats had measurable SARS-CoV-2 neutralizing antibody titers" - Evidence of exposure to SARS-CoV-2 in cats and dogs from households in Italy
24/07/20 07:08 from Saved Stories from Michael_Novakhov (1 sites)
July 24, 2020 @AnimalChannel14 Your dog has many ways of communicating with you - here are 50 things they do and what it means. Here's What Dogs Are Saying When They Lean On You animalchannel.co 6:59 AM 7/24/2020 The researchers say that...

» Saved Stories - None: Evidence of exposure to SARS-CoV-2 in cats and dogs from households in Italy | bioRxiv
24/07/20 06:53 from Saved Stories from Michael_Novakhov (1 sites)
Evidence of exposure to SARS-CoV-2 in cats and dogs from households in Italy View ORCID Profile E.I. Patterson , G. Elia , A. Grassi , A. Giordano , C. Desario , M. Medardo , S.L. Smith , E.R. Anderson , T. Prince , G.T. Patterson , E. L...

» Saved Stories - None: Pets Show Antibodies to SARS-CoV-2 in Italian Study
24/07/20 06:43 from Saved Stories from Michael_Novakhov (1 sites)
The current COVID-19 pandemic is caused by the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus, which is thought to have originated in animals. This jumped species barriers to infect humans and is now showing rapid and easy transmission between them. A new study...

Powered by Feed Informer

______________________________________________

Saved Stories – In 50 Brief Posts | All Saved Stories In Brief – 250

Trump Investigations News Review – Saved Stories – 25 – Saved Stories – None on RSS Dog

Saved Stories - None
Google Alert - Coronavirus in brooklyn: The Church Deacon Died of Covid-19. Then His Body Went Missing.
Google Alert - coronavirus in israel: France: Those traveling from Israel must be tested for COVID-19
Google Alert - coronavirus origins: Tracing the transmission rates and origins of SARS-CoV-2 strains circulating in Brazil
Google Alert - coronavirus in italy: Italy imposes quarantine on travellers from Romania, Bulgaria
Google Alert - Coronavirus in brooklyn: The Latest: Germany to test for coronavirus at airports
Google Alert - covid-19 in meat plants workers: The Daily 202: As US economy careens toward coronavirus cliffs, Trump looks to give FBI a new ...
Google Alert - Sars-Cov-2 in Livestock: We don't even choose 'herd immunity' for livestock
Coronavirus Live Updates: C.D.C. Issues New Schools Guidance
FOX News: Robert E. Lee statue, eight Confederate busts removed from Virginia Capitol
"fbi" - Google News: FBI warns US companies about backdoors in Chinese tax software - ZDNet
The National Interest: Random Sampling Suggests COVID-19 Is 6 Times Deadlier Than Flu
The National Interest: 95 Percent Casualties: Why It Was So Hard to Stop the Nazis From Laying Siege to Leningrad
"fbi" - Google News: FBI: Illegal Attempts to Buy Guns Skyrocketed When Coronavirus Pandemic Began - Officer
The National Interest: Wrecked: How Churchill's Mini-Subs Destroyed Hitler's Battleship Tirpitz
Defense One - All Content: The November Election Is Going to Be a Mess
Security Boulevard: What Twitter Attack Says on Human Nature, Social Engineering
"cia" - Google News: LIPSON: A Put-Up Job: The FBI, CIA, Mueller, and Schiff Investigate Trump-Russia Collusion - Yall Politics
Just Security: The Presidents Private Army
"cia" - Google News: Dont Rush to Judge the CIAs Covert Cyber Offensive - World Politics Review
"fbi" - Google News: Inside the San Antonio FBI - WOAI
"International Security" - Google News: Will NATO still be relevant in the future? - Atlantic Council
The National Interest: Pandemic Problem: Trumps Historical Mistake Dooms His Reelection Prospects
"International Security" - Google News: Whos afraid of Chinas big bad wolf warriors? - The Australian
Window on Eurasia -- New Series: Kremlin Now Using Third-Party Lawsuits to Bankrupt Those who Oppose It, Agora Report Says
"russia" - Google News: Russia c.bank chief gives online press conference after rate decision - Reuters UK

Feed Integration by RSS Dog.

Saved Stories - None
Google Alert - Coronavirus in brooklyn: The Church Deacon Died of Covid-19. Then His Body Went Missing.
Thirteen days later, his body was found in the back of an unrefrigerated U-Haul truck, parked on a busy Brooklyn street in front of a Dollar General and ...  Google Alert - Coronavirus in brooklyn
Google Alert - coronavirus in israel: France: Those traveling from Israel must be tested for COVID-19
PARIS - People arriving from 16 countries outside the European Union where the infection rate of COVID-19 is deemed to be high will be subject to ...  Google Alert - coronavirus in israel
Google Alert - coronavirus origins: Tracing the transmission rates and origins of SARS-CoV-2 strains circulating in Brazil
Brazil, like the United States, has taken a hands-off approach in dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic. Like the U.S., the country has a leader who has ...  Google Alert - coronavirus origins
Google Alert - coronavirus in italy: Italy imposes quarantine on travellers from Romania, Bulgaria
Italy, one of the European countries worst-affected by the novel coronavirus, had already banned entry to people coming from 16 countries including ...  Google Alert - coronavirus in italy
Google Alert - Coronavirus in brooklyn: The Latest: Germany to test for coronavirus at airports
BERLIN German authorities plan to set up testing stations at airports to prod people arriving from high-risk countries to get tested for the coronavirus ...  Google Alert - Coronavirus in brooklyn
Google Alert - covid-19 in meat plants workers: The Daily 202: As US economy careens toward coronavirus cliffs, Trump looks to give FBI a new ...
Sandra Cruz, who lost her job because of the coronavirus pandemic and fell ... administration pushes the industry to develop and manufacture covid-19 ... (Los Angeles Times); Workers at a meat plant in Pennsylvania are suing the ...  Google Alert - covid-19 in meat plants workers
Google Alert - Sars-Cov-2 in Livestock: We don't even choose 'herd immunity' for livestock
An adequate level of herd immunity against COVID-19 requires 60% to 70% of the world to become infected and here's the hard part survive ...  Google Alert - Sars-Cov-2 in Livestock
Coronavirus Live Updates: C.D.C. Issues New Schools Guidance
A new C.D.C. statement on schools calls for reopening and downplays the potential health risks. The top U.S. public health agency issued a full-throated call to reopen schools in a package of new “resources and tools” posted on its website Thursday night that opened with a statement that sounded more like a political speech than a scientific document, listing numerous benefits for children of being in school and downplaying the potential health risks. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention published the new guidance two weeks after President Trump criticized its earlier recommendations on school reopenings as “very tough and expensive,” ramping up what had already been an anguished national debate over the question of how soon children should return to classrooms. As the president was criticizing the initial C.D.C. recommendations, a document from the agency surfaced that detailed the risks of reopening and the steps that districts were taking to minimize those risks. “Reopening schools creates opportunity to invest in the education, well-being, and future of one of America’s greatest assets — our children — while taking every precaution to protect students, teachers, staff and all their families,” the new opening statement said. The package of materials began with the opening statement, titled “The Importance of Reopening America’s Schools This Fall,” and repeatedly described children as being at low risk for being infected by or transmitting the coronavirus, even though the science on both aspects is far from settled. “The best available evidence indicates if children become infected, they are far less likely to suffer severe symptoms,” the statement said. “At the same time, the harms attributed to closed schools on the social, emotional, and behavioral health, economic well-being, and academic achievement of children, in both the short- and long-term, are well-known and significant.” While children infected by the virus are at low risk of becoming severely ill or dying, how often they become infected and how efficiently they spread the virus to others is not definitively known. Children in middle and high schools may also be at much higher risk of both than those under 10, according to some recent studies. Beyond the statement, the package included decision tools and checklists for parents, guidance on mitigation measures for schools to take and other information that some epidemiologists described as helpful. The new materials are meant to supplement guidance the C.D.C. previously issued on when and how to reopen schools, with recommendations such as keeping desks six feet apart and keeping children in one classroom all day instead of allowing them to move around. The new statement released on Thursday is a stark departure from the 69-page document, obtained by The New York Times earlier this month, marked “For Internal Use Only,” which was intended for federal public health response teams to have as they are deployed to hot spots around the country. That document classified as “highest risk” the full reopening of schools, and its suggestions for mitigating the risk of school reopenings would be expensive and difficult for many districts, like broad testing of students and faculty and contact tracing to find people exposed to an infected student or teacher. An Associated Press/NORC poll this week found that most Americans said they were very or extremely concerned that reopening K-12 schools for in-person instruction would contribute to spreading the virus. Altogether, 80 percent of respondents said they were at least somewhat concerned, including more than three in five Republicans. As global cases keep soaring, the virus rebounds in places that seemed to have tamed it. As the pandemic continues to grow around the world — new cases have risen more than 35 percent since the end of June — troubling resurgences have hit several places that were seen as models of how to respond to the virus. An outbreak in Melbourne, Australia, has rattled officials after extensive testing and early lockdowns had limited outbreaks for months. Hong Kong — where schools, restaurants and malls were able to stay open — has announced new restrictions in the face of its largest outbreak since the beginning of the pandemic. And cases have surged in Tokyo, which has avoided a full lockdown and relied on aggressive contact tracing to contain flare-ups. Spain’s reopening has stumbled in the month after it lifted a national lockdown. New cases have quadrupled, with high infection rates among young people, and forced hundreds of thousands of people to return to temporary lockdown. As governments around the world look to relax rules put in place to combat the virus, the experiences show how difficult it will be to keep outbreaks at bay. And they reflect, in some places, a weakening public tolerance for restrictions as the pandemic drags on. The scattered resurgences are not driving the pandemic. The biggest sources of new infections continue to be the United States, Brazil and India; the director general of the World Health Organization, Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, noted this week that almost half of all cases worldwide came from just three countries. But the quick turn for the worse in places that once seemed to have gained the upper hand shows the range of vulnerabilities the virus is able to exploit. After Spain’s strict lockdown ended, the national government put regional governments in charge of reopening. That led to a patchwork of rules and regulations that varied widely in strictness and enforcement, much as they have in the United States. While the most serious outbreaks have been in northeastern Spain, only two regions — Madrid and the Canary Islands — reimposed requirements to wear face masks outdoors. In Tokyo, where the recent spikes in cases were attributed to young people congregating in nightlife districts, there have been unnerving signs that infections are now spreading to older people, too — as they have in Florida. In Hong Kong, which succeeded early on by tightening borders and imposing quarantines, the resurgence has forced the government to re-close some businesses, reimpose mask orders and ask some workers to stay home. “Once you loosen the restrictions too much,” warned David Hui, the director of the Stanley Ho Center for Emerging Infectious Diseases at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, “you face a rebound.” Nearly 70,000 cases were recorded in the United States on Thursday, the third-most of any day in the pandemic. The total number of known cases in the country surpassed four million, according to a New York Times database, and the United States also recorded its third consecutive day of at least 1,100 deaths from the virus. In other news around the nation: Republicans struggled on Thursday to find agreement on a new proposal to lift the economy, with Senate leaders and the Trump administration at odds over multiple provisions, including how to extend unemployment benefits and White House requests for spending unrelated to the pandemic. Mr. Trump reversed course and canceled the portion of the Republican National Convention to be held in Jacksonville, Fla., just weeks after he moved the event from North Carolina because state officials wanted the party to take health precautions there. Officials in Washington State announced new restrictions on gatherings at restaurants, bars, weddings, funerals and other businesses. “This is not the easy thing to do, but it is the right thing to do,” Gov. Jay Inslee said in a statement. Alabama set a daily record for cases on Thursday, with 2,390. Four other states — Hawaii, Indiana, Missouri and New Mexico — also hit their single-day peak for new cases, while Florida and Tennessee had more virus-related deaths than on any other day. On Friday, Florida announced more than 12,440 cases and 135 deaths. A conservative think tank has asked the Oregon State Court of Appeals to issue an emergency stay against Gov. Kate Brown’s statewide mask mandate. The Washington-based Freedom Foundation filed the challenge on behalf of three plaintiffs who argue that they cannot wear masks because of their medical, psychological or political beliefs. Masks are set to become a statewide requirement for indoor spaces and outdoor areas — when social distancing isn’t possible — on Friday. Representative John Lewis, the civil rights leader who died July 17, will lie in state in the Capitol Rotunda next week, before a public viewing outside. Mr. Lewis’s family discouraged people from traveling to Washington for the event during the pandemic, instead asking for “virtual tributes” using the hashtags #BelovedCommunity or #HumanDignity. The actor and director Mel Gibson was hospitalized in California in April after testing positive for the virus but has since recovered, his representative said on Thursday. In Cochabamba, high in the Bolivian Andes, people line up daily outside pharmacies on the central plaza, eager to buy the scarce elixir they hope will ward off Covid-19: chlorine dioxide, a kind of bleach used to disinfect swimming pools and floors. Experts say drinking it is pointless at best and hazardous at worst. But in Bolivia, where people have been hospitalized after ingesting chlorine dioxide, regional authorities are testing it on prison inmates, the national Senate last week approved its use and a top lawmaker has threatened to expel the World Health Organization for opposing its medical use. Julio César Baldivieso, a local soccer hero and former national team captain, told a local television station that because Cochabamba’s hospitals “don’t have tests, they don’t have materials, they don’t have protective equipment,” he and his family had turned to chlorine dioxide to treat their coronavirus symptoms. Bolivians have a lot of company in resorting to unproven and even dangerous treatments to prevent or treat infection. In every part of the world, hard science has had to compete for attention with pet theories, rumors and traditional beliefs during this pandemic, as in the past. Even in the United States, President Trump has promoted treatments that scientists say are useless. But interest in dubious medicines has been especially high recently in Latin America, where the virus is raging uncontrolled and many political leaders are promoting them, whether out of genuine faith or a desire to offer hope and deflect blame. In a region where few people can afford quality medical care, alternative treatments are widely touted on social media and exploited by profiteers. “The people feel desperate when confronted with Covid-19,” said Santiago Ron, an Ecuadorean biology professor, who has clashed with proponents of supposed treatments. “They are very vulnerable to pseudoscientific promises.” One of New Zealand’s secrets to its successful virus response may be a simple one: trust. In a national survey of more than 1,000 people, researchers found that nearly all New Zealanders have adopted hygiene practices known to deter the virus, and their belief in the authorities was at almost 100 percent. Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern has been praised internationally for her government’s pandemic response and for her leadership through the crisis, which saw the country institute a total national lockdown when cases were just beginning. To date, the country has had just 1,556 cases and 22 deaths, and has gone 83 days without community transmission of the virus. Almost all New Zealanders correctly understand important facts about the coronavirus, with nearly nine in 10 aware of the symptoms, protective behaviors and asymptomatic transmission. The survey, led by Dr. Jagadish Thaker and Dr. Vishnu Menon of the Massey University School of Communication, Journalism and Marketing, also noted widespread approval for how the government has handled the pandemic and praise for Ms. Ardern and the director general of health, Dr. Ashley Bloomfield. “There was a feeling of unity and a sense that we had a leader looking after us, which was in sharp contrast to other leaders in the U.S. and U.K.,” Dr. Thaker said in a statement. Dr. Thaker noted that the success of New Zealand’s response had become “the envy of the world as our lives return to normality.” Global Roundup South Africa will close schools again, as the president warns of a coming wave of infections. President Cyril Ramaphosa of South Africa announced Thursday that the country’s public schools would shut down for the next four weeks, calling it “a break.” Children had begun returning to school in June in a phased reopening after a four-month shutdown. Schools are now set to close again on Monday. “We have taken a deliberately cautious approach to keep schools closed during a period when the country is expected to experience its greatest increase in infections,” Mr. Ramaphosa said in an address to the nation. A survey released Thursday from researchers at the University of Johannesburg and the Human Sciences Research Council showed that 60 percent of South African adults do not want schools to open again this year. With at least 408,000 coronavirus cases, South Africa is the fifth-hardest-hit country in the world and has the highest caseload in Africa, according to a New York Times database. There were more than 17,000 excess deaths in the country from May 6 to July 14, as compared to data from the past two years, according to a report from the South African Medical Research Council released this week. That is a 59 percent increase in the number of deaths by natural causes than would normally be expected. “The numbers have shown a relentless increase,” the report said. The council’s president, Glenda Gray, said the excess deaths could be attributed to coronavirus as well as to H.I.V., tuberculosis and noncommunicable diseases “as health services are re-orientated to support this health crisis.” In other news from around the globe: France reported a sharp uptick in new virus cases on Thursday, with more than 1,000 new infections recorded in 24 hours. The rise confirms a weeks-long upward trend. There were about 800 new cases per day on average over the past seven days, compared with 500 per day the previous week, according to a New York Times database. Nevertheless, professional soccer will return Friday after a four-month lapse with a match for the French Cup final. Attendance in the Stade de France in Paris, which can hold 80,000 fans, will be capped at 5,000. Masks are now required in shops, supermarkets, transportation hubs and when picking up food and drink from restaurants in England. Those who refuse to wear a face covering could be fined up to 100 pounds, or $127. But as the new guidelines came into force on Friday, some supermarkets and coffee shop chains said they would not challenge customers who enter their businesses unmasked. Germany will offer free coronavirus tests to citizens returning from abroad as part of new measures agreed to on Friday to curb the virus’s spread. Those who fly in from countries considered to be high-risk can undergo tests directly at the airport upon arrival, Jens Spahn, Germany’s health minister said. The tests are voluntary, although officials are exploring the legal possibilities of making them mandatory. Germany recorded 815 new cases on Friday, more than double the number recorded at the beginning of July. Bring the change you want to see in the world, the Mint urges. Pennies and dimes are hard to find in many parts of America after pandemic lockdowns disrupted their flow and kept people from exchanging their jars of coins for dollar bills. The U.S. Mint wants you to know that you can be part of the solution. “We ask that the American public start spending their coins,” the Mint, which is part of the U.S. Treasury, implored in a statement on Thursday. Or you should deposit them or exchange them for cash, it urged. “The coin supply problem can be solved with each of us doing our part,” the statement said. The coin shortage has forced regional Federal Reserve Banks, which distribute change, to institute a rationing system. On June 30, the Fed established a coin task force to deal with the unfolding crisis, complete with “industry leaders in the coin supply chain.” The shortage has become a problem for many small businesses across America, and the topic of fraught discussions on doomsday Reddit and the local news. Even big retailers are feeling the penny pinch — Walmart, CVS, Kroger and other chains have begun asking customers to pay with plastic when possible or to use exact change. While digital payments have become prevalent, change has remained crucial to some parts of the economy: Parking meters, vending machines, amusement parks and even campground showers keep coins in regular use. For the unbanked, cash is an essential part of daily life. “For millions of Americans, cash is the only form of payment, and cash transactions rely on coins to make change,” the Mint said. “As important as it is to get more coins circulating, safety is paramount,” it added. “Please be sure to follow all safety and health guidelines.” The quiet planet: A locked-down Earth is making a lot less noise, geologists report. Heavy traffic, football games, rock concerts, fireworks, factories, jackhammers — all help make up the pulse of human activity, and in a world forced into lethargy by pandemic, that pulse is measurably quieter. A team of 76 scientists from more than two dozen countries, drawing on readings from earthquake-detection equipment, reported that lockdowns have led to a drop of up to 50 percent in the global din tied to humans. “The length and quiescence of this period represents the longest and most coherent global seismic noise reduction in recorded history,” the scientists wrote in the journal Science. That quiet, they said, resulted from social distancing, industrial shutdowns and drops in travel and tourism. The decline far exceeded what is typically observed on weekends and holidays. The seismometers used by geologists to listen for underground movement are highly sensitive. Apart from earthquakes and human activity, they can detect waves crashing onto shorelines and the impacts of rocky intruders from outer space. In 2001, when the World Trade Center in New York City collapsed, the vibrations registered in five states. For this study, the team assembled data from 337 seismometers run by citizen scientists and 268 stations run by government, university and corporate geologists. They found that the quieting began in China in late January and spread to Europe and the rest of the world in March and April. By the end of the monitoring period, in May, the vibration levels in Beijing remained lower, suggesting that the pandemic was still restricting activity there, the researchers said. Nearly four months after the pandemic’s peak in New York, the city is facing such serious delays in returning test results that public health experts are warning that the problems could hinder efforts to reopen the local economy and schools. Despite repeated pledges from Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo and Mayor Bill de Blasio that testing would be both widely accessible and effective, thousands of New Yorkers have had to wait a week or more for results, and at some clinics the median wait time is nine days. One prominent local official has even proposed the drastic step of limiting testing. The delays are caused in part by the outbreak’s spike in states like California, Florida and Texas, which has strained laboratories across the country and touched off a renewed national testing crisis. Just weeks after resolving shortages in swabs, researchers across the country are struggling to find the chemicals and plastic pieces they need to carry out tests in the lab — leading to long waiting times. But officials have also been unable to adequately expand the capacity of state and city government laboratories in New York to test rapidly at a time when they are asking more New Yorkers to get tested to guard against a second wave. As capacity expanded, New York City authorities began encouraging everyone to get tested, and urged people to get tested repeatedly, setting a target of 50,000 tests per day. In recent weeks, about 20,000 to 35,000 people are tested most weekdays, a demand that has put a strain on local labs. City public health officials said they were growing increasingly alarmed by the delays, pointing out that widespread testing and quick turnaround times were needed to reduce transmission by asymptomatic and pre-symptomatic patients, who are believed to play a major part in the virus’s spread. “This is becoming a problem,” said Dr. Jay Varma, a City Hall adviser who has a critical role in the city’s testing and contact-tracing program. “Any lag in this process can make it more difficult to have case and contact tracing be effective.” New York City’s abrupt lockdown in March came just before the annual onslaught of tourists as the weather begins to warm. Officials were expecting more than 67 million visitors in 2020, about one-fifth of them from outside the country. Now the city’s tourism officials have been left wondering how they will ever revive an industry that brought in about $45 billion in annual spending and supported about 300,000 jobs. In the second week of July, the occupancy rate of New York City hotels was just 37 percent, according to STR, a research firm. That is down from more than 90 percent in recent summers. “We think it’s too soon to encourage travel and invite folks to come back in,” said Fred Dixon, the chief executive of NYC & Company, the city’s tourism marketing agency. He said that for the past four months the city had had no tourism to speak of and that he was not even guessing how many visitors it would tally for the year. Among the few tourists in town this week were Shin Roldan, 31, and her new husband, Keith, 30, who live in Morristown, N.J, within commuting distance. They were having a honeymoon of sorts, a few months after a “pandemic wedding” in their backyard, Ms. Roldan said. They had already ridden the tram to Roosevelt Island in the East River and planned to go to the observation deck atop the Empire State Building, which had just reopened. “We can take a lot of pictures, just the two of us, with nobody else in the pictures,” Mr. Roldan said. “That’s always a problem in New York.” Reporting was contributed by Dan Bilefsky, William J. Broad, José María León Cabrera, Julia Calderone, Emily Cochrane, Michael Cooper, Melissa Eddy, Joseph Goldstein, Abby Goodnough, Maggie Haberman, Annie Karni, Josh Keller, Anatoly Kurmanaev, Patricia Mazzei, Patrick McGeehan, Jesse McKinley, Constant Méheut, Raphael Minder, Elian Peltier, Alan Rappeport, Giovanni Russonello, Nate Schweber, Mitch Smith, Megan Specia, Kaly Soto, Jim Tankersley, María Silvia Trigo, Daniel Victor and Lauren Wolfe.
FOX News: Robert E. Lee statue, eight Confederate busts removed from Virginia Capitol
A life-size statue of General Robert E. Lee along with the busts of eight of his Confederate colleagues were removed from Virginia's Capitol late Thursday and early Friday.  FOX News
"fbi" - Google News: FBI warns US companies about backdoors in Chinese tax software - ZDNet
FBI warns US companies about backdoors in Chinese tax software  ZDNet  "fbi" - Google News
The National Interest: Random Sampling Suggests COVID-19 Is 6 Times Deadlier Than Flu
Nir Menachemi Public Health, North America From April 25 to May 1, our team randomly selected and tested thousands of Indiana residents, no matter if theyd been sick or not. From this testing we were able to get some of the first truly representative data on coronavirus infection rates at a state level. Since day one of the coronavirus pandemic, the U.S. has not had enough tests. Faced with this shortage, medical professionals used what tests they had on people with the worst symptoms or whose occupations put them at high risk for infection. People who were less sick or asymptomatic did not get tested. Because of this, many infected people in the U.S. have not been tested, and much of the information public health officials have about the spread and deadliness of the virus does not provide a complete picture.  Short of testing every person in the U.S., the best way to get accurate data on who and how many people have been infected with the coronavirus is to test randomly.  I am a professor of health policy and management at Indiana University, and random testing is exactly what we did in my state. From April 25 to May 1, our team randomly selected and tested thousands of Indiana residents, no matter if theyd been sick or not. From this testing we were able to get some of the first truly representative data on coronavirus infection rates at a state level.  We found that 2.8% of the states population had been infected with SARSCoV2. We also found that minority communities especially Hispanic communities have been hit much harder by the virus. With this representative data, we were also able to calculate out just how deadly the virus really is.  The process of random testing  The goal of our study was to learn how many Indiana residents, in total, were currently or had been previously been infected by the coronavirus. To do this, the people our team tested needed to be an accurate representation of Indianas population as a whole and we needed to use two tests on every person.  With the help of the Indiana State Department of Health, numerous state agencies and community leaders, we set up 70 testing stations in cities and towns across Indiana. We then randomly selected people from a list created using state tax records and invited them to get tested, free of charge. Some groups showed up more readily than others and we adjusted the numbers to represent the demographics of the state accordingly.  Once a person showed up to our mobile testing sites, they were given both a PCR swab test that looks for current infections and an antibody blood test that looks for evidence of past infection.  By testing randomly and looking for both current and past infections, we could extrapolate our results to the entire state of Indiana and get information about real infection rates of this virus.  The research team also worked with civic leaders from vulnerable communities to conduct open, nonrandom testing as well to see how the results of these two testing approaches would differ.  How widespread and how deadly  We tested more than 4,600 Indiana residents as part of the first wave of testing in the study. This included more than 3,600 randomly selected people and more than 900 volunteers who participated in open testing.  During the last week in April, we estimate that 1.7% of the population had active viral infections. An additional 1.1% had antibodies, showing evidence of previous infection. In total, we estimate that 2.8% of the population currently were or had previously been infected with the coronavirus with 95% confidence that the actual infection rate is between 2% and 3.7%.  Because our random sample was designed to be representative of the population of the state, we can assume with almost certainty that the entire state numbers are the same. That would mean that approximately 188,000 Indiana residents had been infected by late April. At that point, the official confirmed cases not including deaths  were about 17,000.  Focusing the tests on severe or high-risk people underestimated the true infection rate by a factor of 11.  Having a reliable estimate of the true number of people who have been infected also allowed us to calculate the infection fatality rate the percentage of people infected with SARS-CoV-2 who die. In Indiana, we calculated the rate is 0.58%. For this calculation, we divided the number of COVID-19 deaths in Indiana 1,099 at the time into the total number of people that were determined to have been cumulatively infected at 2.8% of the population 188,000.  Early estimates suggested that 5% to 6% of cases in the U.S. were fatal, which is similar to the 6.3% that you would get by dividing confirmed cases in Indiana 17,000 by the deaths 1,099. The infectionfatality rate of 0.58% is thankfully far lower, but is nearly six times higher than the seasonal flu which has a death rate of 0.1%.  This random testing also allowed us to make accurate estimates about what percent of infected people are asymptomatic. In our study, about 44% of those who tested positive for active viral infection reported no symptoms. While this was already suspected by experts, our estimate is likely the most accurate to date.  Race, job and living situation matter  The general trends and information about the virus are incredibly important, but just as important are the ways in which human actions influenced what people are most affected.  We asked every person we tested about their race, ethnicity and whether they lived with someone who was previously diagnosed with COVID-19.  Our analysis of the random sample suggests that COVID-19 rates are much higher in minority communities, especially in Hispanic communities, where approximately 8% were currently or previously infected. While we do not definitively know why, it is possible that members of the Hispanic community in Indiana are more likely to be essential workers, live in extended family structures that include relatives beyond the nuclear family or both.  We further found that people who lived with a person who was COVID-19 positive were approximately 12 times more likely to have the virus themselves than people living in a home with no infections. Living with extended family and being more exposed due to ones job may make it easier for the virus to spread within some communities.  These findings, along with the relatively low 2.8% prevalence, suggest that social distancing slowed the spread of the virus in the larger population. However, the hardest-hit communities were those who, on average, are not able to practice social distancing as consistently as others.  What next?  Now that we have this information and have established a baseline, we will continue periodically testing a random sample of people in the state. Doing so will tell us how far the virus has infiltrated our population so that policy decisions can be tailored to the situation.  This is the first statewide random sample study in the U.S. and the numbers offer both points of hope and concern.  The good news is that social distancing worked. Efforts to slow the virus contained it to only 2.8% of the population and by slowing the spread of the virus in the community, Indiana bought some time to determine the best way forward. This provides more time for researchers to both determine the degree to which infection results in immunity and to accelerate the development of a vaccine.  But there is bad news as well. If only 2.8% of the population have been infected with SARS-CoV-2, 97.2% of the population have not been infected and could still get the virus. The risk for a large outbreak that could dwarf the initial wave is still very real.  The demographic distribution of infections, while disturbing, offers important information that can help public health officials direct testing, education and contact tracing resources that are language and culturally sensitive. The research team and the state health department are working with leaders from these communities to figure out how to best contain the spread of the virus in the areas most affected.  As businesses slowly reopen, we need to be vigilant with any and all safety precautions so that we do not lose the ground we gained by hunkering down. Hopefully numbers will go down, but regardless of what happens in the future, we now better know the foe we fight.  Nir Menachemi is a Professor of Health Policy and Management at IUPUI.  This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.  Image: Reuters   The National Interest
The National Interest: 95 Percent Casualties: Why It Was So Hard to Stop the Nazis From Laying Siege to Leningrad
Warfare History Network History, Europe The battle lasted years and killed millions. Key Point: The Soviets would lose an entire army when trying to save the city. In fact, multiple offensives would fail, although eventually Moscow would suceed and end the siege. On February 23, 1942, Red Army Day, the Peoples Commissar of Defense, Josef Stalin, issued Order No. 55. It read in part as follows: But the enemys efforts have been in vain. The initiative now is in our hands and the futile attempts of Hitlers out of tune, rusted machine are unable to withstand the pressure of the Red Army. The day is not far when a powerful blow of the Red Army will hurl back the enemy beasts from Leningrad, clear from them the towns and villages of Byelorussia and Ukraine, Lithuania and Latvia, Estonia and Karelia, liberate the Soviet Crimea, and all over the Soviet land the red banners will again soar victoriously. At the end of 1941, six months after the Germans launched Operation Barbarossa, the invasion of the Soviet Union, the Soviet losses in territory and human lives were staggering, without precedent in modern military history. Some 570,000 square miles, an area equal to that of all occupied Europe, with a population of no less than 70 million and enormous industrial and agricultural output, was lost. For all practical purposes, the original Soviet air force and armor ceased to exist, and of those Red Army men who met the German onslaught in June, only 8 percent were still in the ranks. Despite these tragic, crushing facts, the mood of the Soviet supreme commander, Premier Josef Stalin, was optimistic because of recent news from different corners of the front. A Soviet counteroffensive, launched on December 5, had driven the Germans from the gates of Moscow and liberated Tula and Moscow provinces. Rostov was retaken, and the railroad town of Tikhvin, the key to the survival of Leningrad, was recaptured after a desperate and furious offensive. Stalin was convinced that all strategic dispositions had changed in favor of the Red Army and that the Moscow offensive would continue unabated, in conjunction with massive strikes along all the length of the enormous front. When the always cautious and prudent Chief of General Staff Marshal Boris Shaposhnikov timidly suggested consolidating the achieved gains and switching to strategic defense all along the front, Stalin brushed him aside, saying, Hitler is already exhausted. With a unified blow along all fronts we will overrun his armies and throw them off our land. The Soviet people will not understand us, comrades, if we will call them to passive defense. On the last day of December a meeting took place in the Kremlin during which plans for the next years campaign were outlined. At the beginning of January, these plans were submitted for Stalins approval. The final product became known as the Soviet Supreme Command or Stavkas directive letter. On January 5, Stalin personally dictated the final paragraph: Our task is not to give the Germans breathing space but drive them westward without stopping, forcing them to spend their reserves before spring, when we will have new great reserves, and the Germans will have no reserves, thus providing the complete destruction of the Hitlerite forces in 1942. It was a rather cumbersome piece of literary work, but its military implications would prove outright deadly for the Soviets. According to this plan, a few major strategic operations were to be conducted in which nine out of 10 Soviet Fronts, or army groups, including a newly created Crimean Front, were destined to take part. In the south an immediate campaign to liberate the Crimea and the besieged city of Sevastopol would begin. The Southwestern Front was to retake Kharkov and secure Donbass, with its rich coal deposits. In the west, the offensive toward Smolensk and Byelorussia was to continue. In the north, the combined efforts of the Leningrad Front and the recently created Volkhov Front would break through the German 18th Army defense line. The armies of the Volkhov Front, advancing in a northwesterly direction, would meet the troops of the Leningrad Front driving south, thus shattering the German ring around Leningrad. The enemy units in the area of Chudovo-Luban would be isolated and destroyed. The situation in Leningrad, the second largest city of the Soviet Union and one of its most important industrial centers, was catastrophic. The city had been under siege since September 8, 1941, when German troops captured the town of Shlisselburg, where the Neva River exits Lake Ladoga, and severed all land communications with the rest of the country. In the west, Finnish troops reached the pre-Winter War border on the Karelian Isthmus and took up a defensive position there. In the north, they stopped at the Svir River in the Ladoga-Onega gap. The Germans cut off the city from the south, effectively blockading it. When Told of These Details, Stalin Simply Shrugged and Said, This is War. People are Dying Everywhere. Since the end of November, the city had been supplied by auto road across the frozen surface of Lake Ladoga. The volume of delivered supplies was not even close to providing enough food for the fighting armies of the Leningrad Front and the remaining civilian population, which was still more than two million. People had begun dying from famine by the end of October. By the beginning of November, there were no dogs or cats left in the city. In December, the famine was exacerbated by the unusually low temperatures, pushing the death toll to 55,000. In January this climbed to 95,000. No less deadly, February was ready to follow. Stalin was informed about the conditions in the city. It is difficult to surmise what his real feelings were when he learned details about life in the frozen and dying city, about massive death from starvation, frozen corpses on the streets, cases of cannibalism. Allegedly for the safety of this city, he had started the war with Finland only two years earlier. When told of these details, he simply shrugged and said, This is war. People are dying everywhere. The strategic goals of the planned operation were very ambitious. The 4th Army of the Volkhov Front and the 54th Army of the Leningrad Front were ordered to break through the German defenses along the Volkhov River and advance in the direction of Tosno, a town on the Leningrad-Moscow railroad, capture it, and link with the advancing 55th Army of the Leningrad Front. This would isolate and eventually destroy the German forces in the Mga-Shlisselburg corridor. The 59th Army and the 2nd Shock Army, representing the main striking force of the coming operation, received the mission to attack northwest toward the Siverskiy station on the Luga-Leningrad railroad, conducting a deep envelopment of Leningrad from the south. A combined effort with the 4th Army would cut off the German XXVIII Corps in the Chudovo-Luban area. The 52nd Army was ordered to strike south, capture Novgorod, and link up with the forces of the Northwestern Front. The Soviet High Command expected that the result of this operation would be not only the end of the siege of Leningrad, but also the destruction of German Army Group North and the liberation of the Baltic republics. At the end of 1941, the Red Army was about to bite off more than it could chew. Lieutenant General Mikhail Khozin was appointed to command the Leningrad Front. Commanding the newly created Volkhov Front was Army General Kirill Meretskov, former chief of the general staff of the Red Army. He had only recently been the object of torture and humiliation in the cellars of the notorious Lubianka Prison in Moscow. The new Front received four armies, the recently formed 52nd and 4th, already blooded in the stubborn battle for Tikhvin, and two fresh armies from the Reserves of Stavka, 2nd Shock and 59th Regular. The influx of men and equipment gave the Volkhov Front and the left flank of the Leningrad Front numerical and technical superiority over their opponents in men, artillery, and aircraft. In the sector of the 2nd Shock Army, this advantage was an overwhelming five to one in men and three to one in tanks. However, a catastrophic shortage of ammunition, especially for artillery, seriously diminished these advantages. The terrain where the attack was planned was extremely unsuitable for military operations. It was a thickly wooded, roadless area with impassable marshes and numerous though relatively small rivers and streams, with the sole exception of the 450-yard-wide Volkhov River. This forbidding terrain prohibited the use of armor; even infantry would be hard pressed to advance and keep its lines of supply and communications functioning. What were the Soviet High Command considerations for embarking on a strategic offensive on such difficult terrain? First, in the middle of a severe winter most marshes and all rivers were frozen solid and could provide enough support for armor and supply columns to move. It imposed, of course, rigid time restrictions on the operational schedule. The goals had to be successfully achieved before the spring thaw set in. The Soviet High Command, encouraged by recent success in fighting under winter conditions, believed that snow, cold temperatures, and difficult terrain would be allies of the Red Army. They based this assessment first on the fighting around Moscow, where the Germans proved to be completely unprepared for winter warfare. Second, the recapture of Tikhvin and a successful Moscow offensive reminded the political leadership of the old adage, The summer was yours but the winter will be ours. Stalin, euphoric with high expectations, could not see what field commanders and the leadership of the general staff already realizedthat the Moscow offensive was quickly running out of steam. The Luban offensive was scheduled to start at the end of December, but harsh winter weather impeded the concentration of troops and supplies. Stavka was forced to postpone the operation until January 6. Even this extra week could not remedy the numerous problems, but this time Stalin was adamant and refused any further delays. He ordered four armies to start their attack on January 6, without waiting for the 2nd Shock Army to get ready. Despite its numerical superiority, the Volkhov Front was clearly unable to mount a successful offensive. It was short of ammunition, fuel, and food. Its attacking troops were not properly concentrated. Its rear and reserve units were not in position to efficiently support advancing front-line troops. To add to the list of problems, the Germans were fully aware of the coming attack and were well prepared to meet it. After four days of continuous bloody attacks, the Soviet troops gained no ground and suffered heavy losses. The attack was called off on January 10. The troops received a few days of respite to prepare for a new assault. The simultaneous attack, this time by all five Soviet armies, was resumed on January 13. After a few days of heavy fighting, the 2nd Shock Army under its new commander, Lt. Gen. Nikolay Klykov, finally succeeded on January 17 in crossing the Volkhov under enemy fire and penetrating the German defensive line, pushing aside the enemys 215th and 126th Infantry Divisions. After two more days of bitter fighting, the 2nd Shock Army broke through and captured the station and settlement of Miasnoy Bor on the Novgorod-Chudovo railroad. This promising news was immediately reported to Moscow. The response was not long in coming: When the 2nd Shock Army consolidates this success, commit to the battle the 13th Cavalry Corps of General Gusev. I rely on you, comrade Meretskov. Stalin. A cavalry corps consisting of three divisions, supported by the 111th Infantry Division, was thrown into the breach early in the morning of January 24. In five days, while brushing aside light covering detachments of the enemy, this force managed to advance 30 miles to the northwest. Its task was to reach the Moscow-Leningrad railroad between the Luban and Chudovo stations, thus cutting off the main supply line of the German XXVIII Corps. In the beginning of the offensive, the 2nd Shock Army concentrated its forces and delivered a blow on a relatively narrow 15-mile front. Unsupported by either the 52nd or 59th Army on its flanks, the 2nd Shock Army was eventually forced to widen the front of its advance. Originally ordered to head west-northwest with the goal of cutting off the Luga-Leningrad railroad and blocking the retreat of the German 18th Army, the 2nd Shock Army was forced to advance northeast toward Luban and meet the 54th Army of the Leningrad Front, thus encircling the XXVIII Corps in the Luban-Chudovo area. Moreover, the armys failure to widen and secure the six-mile gap between the villages of Spasskaya Polist and Lubtsy, the umbilical cord through which all supplies and communications of the army were flowing, was to haunt the advancing army and eventually seal its fate. The attempt of the Leningrad Fronts 55th Army to break the German encirclement from inside was repulsed. Though starved and exhausted, the army managed to tie down the German forces, thus preventing them from reinforcing the troops facing the attack of the 2nd Shock Army in the south. There Were Fully Clothed Corpses All Around, but it was Impossible to Remove the Boots From Frozen Bodies. The 54th Army of the Leningrad Front was originally aimed west toward Tosno on the Leningrad-Moscow railroad. After one and a half months of unsuccessful and bloody attempts to break through, Stalin expressed dissatisfaction with its commander, Maj. Gen. Ivan Feduninsky. Stavka ordered the army reorganized. The operational direction was changed, and the army was ordered to strike southwest no later than March 1 to exploit the success of the 2nd Shock Army and join it at Luban no later than March 5. All these Stavka orders turned out to be too optimistic. The 54th Army managed to start the new assault on February 28, but it achieved meager results after several days of heavy fighting against well entrenched Germans. Regrouped and reinforced, the army resumed its offensive on March 5, again unsuccessfully. Only on March 15, after five days of bitter fighting, did it finally manage to penetrate the German defenses and advance 14 miles to Luban. There were only 10 miles left between Soviet front-line units and Luban, but covering these 10 miles was beyond the armys capacity. The road to Luban turned out to be two years long. In March, the 2nd Shock Army continued its advance northwest toward the Leningrad-Novgorod railroad, which it managed to sever, and northeast toward Luban and the Leningrad-Moscow railroad. Originally planned as a blow by a tightly clenched fist, the operation turned into a two-fingered poke. In mid-March, the 80th Cavalry Division of the 13th Cavalry Corps broke through enemy defenses near the village of Krasnaya Gorka, less than 10 miles from its objective. It appeared that one more desperate effort would tip the balance, cutting off the XXVIII Corps. A couple of days later, German infantry and artillery hurled the Soviets back from Krasnaya Gorka. Still, some considered this only a local setback. It could possibly be reversed by a renewed effort from the 2nd Shock Army. Then, the weather turned brutally cold. The winter of 1941-1942 was unusually severe, with temperatures dropping to -35 degrees Fahrenheit on a daily basis. Tired and half frozen men would frequently fall asleep around campfires. Heavily padded jackets and pants would catch fire like powder, often causing serious or even life-threatening burns. The most vulnerable of the soldiers winter clothing was their felt boots. When burned through, they would become useless, forcing the soldiers to look for new ones. There were fully clothed corpses all around, but it was impossible to remove the boots from frozen bodies. There were reports of some soldiers obtaining axes and hacking off the booted legs of the dead. Others reportedly broke off a leg at the knee and then dragged the limb to the campfire, warming it sufficiently to remove the coveted item. The terrible cold thickened the ice on rivers and streams to five feet or more, enough to support not only wheeled transport but also armor. Despite such cold, some marshes were left unfrozen, and many trucks, artillery pieces, and men sank to their deaths, betrayed by treacherous snow cover, which was hiding the danger. From the beginning, the Soviet command knew about the terrain and was racing against time. At the end of March it became clear that spring had arrived ahead of Soviet military success. Another factor intervened on March 19. The six-mile-wide corridor at Miasnoy Bor was the only passage connecting the advancing army with its supply base. It was the most vulnerable place in the whole disposition of the 2nd Shock Army; entrenched German units on both sides of the corridor were poised like two daggers aimed at a jugular vein. It had never been easy for reinforcements and supply columns to cross this narrow valley of death under the enemys artillery fire. However, columns were going in both directions, into the cauldron with ammunition, food, and medicine, and out of it with wounded and sick. On March 19, this flow stopped; the Germans closed the corridor. The implications were felt immediately. The 2nd Shock Army had already been short of ammunition. During the advance the army was not able to build up adequate depots, and as soon as the flow of supplies stopped the shortage was immediately and painfully felt. The main casualty of this interruption was food, which on the list of priorities was allocated to the second or even third position, after ammunition and medical supplies. Hunger became part of daily life. It took the Russians two weeks of fierce fighting to restore the corridor, but the situation improved only marginally. The restored supply line was substantially narrower, and German artillery was able to completely shut down the flow of supplies during daytime. The April thaw finally arrived, and frozen roadways became seas of impassable mud, pockmarked with shell craters. The response to this new, though expected problem, was to build corduroy roads. Thankfully, there were abundant trees for these tasks. The work itself was backbreaking and time consuming. Units were mobilized to cut down the trees, drag them through the melting snow and mud, and put them into place. In March the first cases of scurvy and night blindness appeared, unmistakable signs of malnutrition. In the middle of the month, when these cases were growing at an alarming rate, the decision was made to employ a remedy used in gulag camps and in besieged Leningrad. This involved drinking a concoction of fir tree needles steeped in hot water. It was an effective, yet repulsive and bitter, liquid. By the end of March, it became clear that the Soviet troops had lost their race against time. Rations were reduced to a nonsustainable level, a few ounces of crumbs daily, occasionally accompanied by flour or oats. Men were reduced to scavenging. The horses, which had fallen during winter, their bodies now exposed by the melting snow, were consumed. The worst was yet to come. In desperation, the Soviet command turned to resupplying the troops by air. For this purpose they used the old workhorse of the air force, the light bomber and transport U-2 (since 1944 known as PO-2), which it was said could land on a five kopeck coin. It was a two-seat, single-bay light biplane used mostly for night missions, taking full advantage of the long winter nights in these latitudes. Because of its low speed, only 105 miles per hour, it was completely defenseless against German fighters. The number of available planes was very limited, a few dozen at best, with a maximum load capacity of only 550 pounds, or roughly five to six sacks of flour, 12 to 15 with dry bread, or 10 to 12 boxes of canned goods. They were flown by young lieutenants, who, to avoid attacks by marauding German fighters, were flying at tree- top level over the forest and even below that along the river valleys and marshes. In turn, it made them very vulnerable to ground fire, but it was the price of their deadly game. At the end of April, the Northern Lights took away their advantage of nocturnal cover. It was impossible to feed an army of 80,000 men with occasional deliveries of a few dozen sacks of flour, but those brave pilots continued their suicidal, hopeless work. Those young lieutenants often died before accomplishing their fifth mission. One day an American-built Douglas transport arrived. The pilot steeply banked his plane to the left, locked it into a circling pattern, and started passing over a clearing in the woods, dumping sacks of dried bread. A German fighter came out of nowhere, and its machine-guns set the transports right engine ablaze. Jump, jump! yelled the people on the ground, as though the crew could hear them. But they did not want to jump. They continued their doomed flight, trailing black smoke, dumping and dumping the sacks. The German fighter repeated its attack. The Douglas shuddered, wrapped itself in a black cloud of smoke, and went down. Each pound of food in those planes was worth its weight in gold, and every hour of flight was a hide-and-seek game with death. Yet, the political leadership saw fit to displace a portion of the food cargo with propaganda leaflets exhorting the starved soldiers to fight heroically for the Bolshevist cause and for Stalin. These pieces of paper could not even be used to roll a cigarette. There was no tobacco anyway. On January 18, Field Marshal Wilhelm Ritter von Leeb, commander of German Army Group North, was dismissed from his position because of poor health and replaced by Colonel General Georg von Kuechler, the 18th Army commander. The health issue was, of course, a convenient excuse. In fact, the field marshal had persisted in his demand to withdraw the army group westward to a more defensible position. Leebs dismissal was the last in a chain of a major reshufflings at the top of the German High Command due to setbacks, which began with the fall of Rostov in November 1941. The 2nd Shock Army was Doomed. The Only Issue now was the Extent of the Catastrophe. Now, in April, it was Stalins turn to rearrange his commanders. On April 16, the 2nd Shock Army commander, Lt. Gen. Nikolai Klykov, who had fallen seriously ill, was flown out of the cauldron to a hospital. He was replaced by the recently appointed deputy commander of the Volkhov Front, Lt. Gen. Andrey Vlasov, a hero of the defensive battles in the Ukraine in the summer of 1941 and a victorious commander of the 20th Army during the fighting around Moscow. On April 20, the new commander of the 2nd Shock Army arrived in the pocket. On April 23, a dumbfounded General Kirill Meretskov read a new directive from Stavka saying that the Volkhov Front had been abolished and its armies incorporated into the Leningrad Front under Lt. Gen. M.S. Khozin. Meretskov was ordered to depart for the western front line and to take the 33rd Army under his command. This untimely reorganization was the result of Khozins many tireless appeals to Stalin with promises of long-awaited success. Stalin finally relented despite the objections of the Chief of General Staff, Marshall Boris Shaposhnikov. The presence of Meretskov in Malaya Vishera at the headquarters of the Volkhov Front in April and May would not have changed the strategic outcome of Luban operation; the campaign was lost, and the 2nd Shock Army was doomed. The only issue now was the extent of the catastrophe. On April 30, the 2nd Shock Army was ordered to stop all offensive operations, switch to strategic defense, and begin the gradual withdrawal of a few selected units toward Miasnoy Bor. The process of withdrawal started immediately and was conducted in an orderly manner under very challenging circumstances. The brave cavalrymen of the 13th Cavalry Corps, who in the middle of March were so close to Luban, were withdrawn, together with a few depleted infantry divisions and one armored brigade. Stavka issued a new order two weeks later under the signatures of Stalin and Alexander Vasilevsky, deputy chief of the general staff, who replaced the sick Shaposhnikov. The order authorized the 2nd Shock Army to break out of semi-encirclement. The line of the new defensive position for the 2nd Shock Army was designated along the western bank of the Volkhov River in the area of Miasnoy Bor-Spasskaya Polist. It meant, for all practical purposes, that the 2nd Shock Army must return to the same position it had occupied at the beginning of the operation four months earlier. It was a final admission of the fact that the operation had failed. By May 20, the strength of the 2nd Shock Army had decreased by half. On May 31, the Germans again closed the corridorthis time permanently. The last act of the 2nd Shock Army tragedy had begun. The army, thoroughly exhausted from incessant combat, lack of food, and exposure to the elements, was in its death throes. The already meager rations were reduced again, this time to 1.5 ounces of bread crumbs per day. In the cauldron, young trees, at first aspens and lindens, then all others, were stripped of their bark. Buds and later fresh leaves disappeared, worms, frogs, and tadpoles became rare delicacies. The army staff reported to the Front headquarters in one of its last radio communications, Massive mortality from hunger is taking place. Incidences of suicide increased among officers and enlisted men. The corpses of dead soldiers were found with pieces of flesh cut from their bodies. Occasional deliveries from death- defying U-2s were not even drops in the bucket. Prevented from landing, they had to resort to dropping canned goods or sacks with dried bread. Those cans that managed to land on solid ground were were sometimes the cause of fights among the soldiers. Those who succumbed to temptation and hid or ate food instead of surrendering it to their commanders were all shot. Besides the absence of food, ammunition, and medicine, there was a lack of water. It was everywhere, in trenches, shell craters, inside the tents, in mens boots, but there was none to drink, nothing with which to wash already used bandages, nothing to sterilize surgeons instruments. Even snow, the seasonal water provider, melted and turned into undrinkable water. In desperation, a method was developed to obtain drinking water that would horrify any reasonable man. Large wooden boxes without bottoms were built. They were wrapped in layers of medical gauze and lowered into holes dug in water-logged soil. In several hours, these improvised wells were full of dark brown water. It was picked up by buckets, filtered through multilayered gauze again, and distributed to medical stations, the wounded, and units in the field. The ration was one cup per day per man. On June 8, the Volkhov Front was reestablished. After Khozin was removed and sent to a command in the western area, he never managed to rise again to the position of Front commander. In March 1944, he was sent from the fighting army to command a secondary military district in the rear. In his place, Lt. Gen. Leonid Govorov, the valiant commander of the 5th Army during the fighting around Moscow, was appointed as commander of the Leningrad Front. General Meretskov came back to his resurrected Front with the specific task of saving the 2nd Shock Army. Meretskov was a good commander, but he was not a magician, and the task of extricating the 2nd Shock Army would have required a miracle. This miracle would have to be accomplished without any additional forces; Stavka had nothing left in reserve. At the end of May, two major Soviet offensives in the south, near Kharkov and in the Crimea, failed. A total of 240,000 troops of the Southwestern Front and 150,000 of the Crimean Front were facing annihilation. Besieged Sevastopol was doomed. The offensive of the Western and Kalinin Fronts in the Rzhev-Viasma area had come to a screeching halt, at the cost of 270,000 dead. In light of these catastrophes, the destruction of the 2nd Shock Army was a relatively minor setback. Since it had become clear in mid-March that the ambitious goals of the Luban operation were unrealistic, Stalin had begun losing interest in it. As soon as hopes of lifting Leningrads blockade and defeating German Army Group North were dashed, there was not much left to attract Stalins attention to this theater of operations. After all, just the capture of Luban, a name hardly known to anybody, rang hollow. Later, simply overwhelmed by the magnitude of the Red Armys multiplying disasters, Stalin switched his attention to other sectors. Only one thing related to this area still attracted his attention: the fate of the 2nd Shock Army commander, General Vlasov. Stalin ordered special army groups and partisan detachments to conduct searches for him. The reason for Stalins level of interest in Vlasov is unknown. The fact remains that he wanted him back. From the end of June until the middle of July, when the Germans announced Vlasovs capture, Stalin asked daily about the progress in the search for him. In the middle of June, the Soviets, retreating to the southeast while engaged in heavy fighting, were squeezed out of their Olkhovka-Finev Lug defensive line. An attempt to stop the German advance along the Novgorod-Leningrad railroad at Glukhaya Kerest also failed. The distance from this abandoned line of defense to Miasnoy Bor in the center of the now-closed corridor was 16 miles. The 2nd Shock Army, finding itself inside the tightening ring, continued its retreat toward Miasnoy Bor. The Germans regrouped their forces and organized a defense line along the eastern bank of the Polist river. The Soviets were stopped cold. The Casualty Rate was 95 Percent. Among Them Were 50,000 POWs. The desperate Soviets had to abandon the only available landing strip, near the village of Novaya Kerest. The corduroy roads were clogged with trucks, prime movers with artillery pieces in tow, and buses carrying wounded. Soviet artillerymen received orders to destroy the immobilized columns to prevent equipment from falling into the enemys hands. They fired through open sights. Many of those trucks and buses are still there today, 60 years later. On June 24, the staff of the 2nd Shock Army received its last radiogram from the Stavka, an order to filter through the enemy lines by dispersing into small, separate groups. By this time the army had ceased to function as a unified body. The army had been abandoned: there would be no help. Some groups tried to break through the German lines in the south, literally walking on corpses. Only a few managed to reach Soviet lines. More than 10,000 wounded were left behind in the meadow between the Glushitsa and Kerest Rivers, appropriately named Valley of Death. A few groups attempted to move north, hoping that the Germans would not expect them to move deeper into the German rear. The Germans set ambushes along the Kerest River, where a great number of the Red Army soldiers perished or were taken prisoner. The group that included General Vlasov moved away from the slaughterhouse along the Polist River. They managed to avoid German patrols and cross the Kerest. After a few days of wandering in the woods, the group split up on June 25. Vlasov, accompanied by a few men, moved northwest. On July 12, Vlasov was arrested by pro-German local police in the village of Tukhovezhi, 30 miles northwest of the city of Novgorod. He was handed over to the German XXXVIII Corps. The following day, he was delivered by truck to 18th Army headquarters at the Siverskiy railroad station. Individual stragglers from the 2nd Army continued appearing at the front-line positions of the Soviet armies of the Volkhov and even Northwestern Fronts until the end of August. The fate of most of them was not enviable. They were brutally interrogated by Special departments of the NKVD, the predecessor of the KGB, the dreaded Soviet secret police. Many of them landed in the gulags or in deadly penal companies. The once 85,000-strong 2nd Shock Army ceased to exist, melting into the mass graves, bottomless marshes, and prison camps, or left unburied in the woods to the west of the Volkhov River. Almost 70,000 men were lost. The cumulative casualties of the Luban operation were staggering. During the offensive from January 7 to April 30, a total force of 325,700 comprising four armies of the Volkhov Front and the 54th Army of the Leningrad Front lost 308,367 soldiers. The casualty rate was 95 percent. Among them were 50,000 POWs. On June 29, Stalin instructed the Soviet Information Bureau to broadcast the following communiqué: The Fascist scribes are quoting astronomical figures of 30,000 supposed prisoners of war and saying that even more than this were killed. Needless to say, this is a typical Fascist lie. According to incomplete figures, at least 30,000 Germans were killed alone Parts of the 2nd Shock Army withdrew to a prepared position. We lost 10,000 killed and about 10,000 missing The remains of some of the dead Red Army soldiers still turn up 60 years later in the marshy woods, startling occasional hikers and mushroom hunters. After his capture, General Vlasov collaborated with the Germans. This betrayal cast a dark shadow over the memory of his vanished army for years to come. Edward Paraubek was born in the Soviet Union and served in the Red Army with the rank of senior lieutenant. He emigrated to the United States in 1978 and resides in Stoughton, Massachusetts. Image: Reuters.  The National Interest
"fbi" - Google News: FBI: Illegal Attempts to Buy Guns Skyrocketed When Coronavirus Pandemic Began - Officer
FBI: Illegal Attempts to Buy Guns Skyrocketed When Coronavirus Pandemic Began  Officer  "fbi" - Google News
The National Interest: Wrecked: How Churchill's Mini-Subs Destroyed Hitler's Battleship Tirpitz
Warfare History Network History, Europe The difficult operation paid off for London and caused much anguish in Berlin. Key point: The battleship was injured by mulitple mini-submarines. Shortly thereafter, the Royal Navy's carriers sent bombers in to finish the job. By mid-1942, the towering German battleship Tirpitz stood alone as the largest, most powerful warship in the world. Despite rarely venturing from her lair deep within the Norwegian fjords, her mere presence in the region forced the British Royal Navy to keep a large number of capital ships in home waters to watch over Allied convoy routes to the Soviet Union. The fact that the menacing shadow of one ship could hold so many others virtually captive in the North Atlantic at a time when they were desperately needed elsewhere was an intolerable situation in the eyes of Britains Prime Minister, Winston Churchill. The greatest single act to restore the balance of naval power would be the destruction or even crippling of the Tirpitz, he wrote. No other target is comparable to it. His obsession with the massive dreadnought was the driving force behind numerous Royal Air Force and Royal Navy attempts to sink her, but all had met with failure. The harsh reality was that inside Norwegian waters the Tirpitz enjoyed the protection of an ice-clad fortress bounded by sheer walls of solid rock and enhanced by German ingenuity. The natural defenses had been substantially bolstered by the deployment of countless artillery batteries and antiaircraft guns in the surrounding mountains while close-quarter protection for the 42,000-ton battleship was provided by layers of heavy antitorpedo nets that were closed around her like a second skin. Nothing had been left to chance, and within these all-encompassing defenses, the Germans confidently believed the Lonely Queen of the North, as the Tirpitz was known, was untouchable. To the Royal Navy looking on from afar, it was not an idle boast. Churchill wanted action, but the British Admiralty could see no way to strike at its nemesis. Naval bombardment was impossible due to the configuration of the intervening land, the fjords were mostly beyond the range of land-based bombers, and a raid by conventional submarines would be suicidal. The X-Craft Program However, from within the deepening gloom that beset the Royal Navy, a ray of light emerged. For a number of years, Navy engineers had been working on the prototype for a 51-foot, 30-ton, four-man midget submarine specifically designed to attack naval targets in strongly defended anchorages. They had developed, in effect, a complete submarine in miniature, but in lieu of torpedoes, the midgets were fitted with two crescent-shaped detachable explosive charges fitted externally on either side of the pressure hull. These mines, each containing two tons of Amatex explosive, were to be planted on the seabed directly under the target ship then detonated with a variable time fuse. It was deemed unlikely that the German command ever envisaged a raid by midget submarines or X-craft, as the British vessels were known, giving rise to optimism that at last an attack on the Tirpitzmight stand a fighting chance of success. It was a tantalizing prospect. Winston Churchill, a renowned enthusiast of covert operations, had been greatly impressed by an earlier raid launched by Italian divers against British ships in Alexandria harbor and was eager for the X-craft to replicate a similar feat against the Tirpitz. His impatience to strike, however, was tempered by a Royal Navy that would not be rushed. While operational considerations dictated that these vessels would require many unique features, Navy experts were determined to develop the X-craft prototype along principles firmly grounded in reality and based on sound submarine practice. Within the halls of the Admiralty there was little enthusiasm for the unconventional, outlandish approach typical of the Special Operations branch. Recommended: What Will the Sixth-Generation Jet Fighter Look Like? Recommended: Imagine a U.S. Air Force That Never Built the B-52 Bomber Recommended: Russia's Next Big Military Sale - To Mexico? Recommended: Would China Really Invade Taiwan? Even at this early stage of X-craft development, the sheer volume of pipes, dials, gauges, levers, and other vital equipment crammed inside the tiny hull left very little space for crew comfort. Navy planners recognized only that men possessing extraordinary self-control could cope with the claustrophobic conditions, and they sought volunteers for special and hazardous duty from among newly commissioned Royal Navy officers. The candidates, including many from Australia and South Africa, were not told what the mission entailed, but over the next few months, they were filtered through rigorous selection criteria. The physically unsuitable, the timid, or men with a death or glory outlook were steadily weeded out. Those who made the grade quickly found themselves undergoing intense training and theoretical courses on the X-craft. Training and weapon development proceeded simultaneously, as further modifications, tests, and sea trials were conducted until the final construction design was approved. With the aid of civilian firms, the first six vessels, designated X-5 through X-10, rolled off the line to form the fledgling 12th Submarine Flotilla. The Plan to Sink the Tirpitz As the momentum of the operation gathered speed, bold theory predictably collided head-on with practical application. Before any attack could be launched, a number of significant roadblocks would need to be cleared, not the least of which involved getting the X-craft to Norway. Experts agreed that German patrols and air reconnaissance ruled out launching the vessels from a depot ship near the Norwegian coast, and a weeklong journey across the North Sea was considered beyond the endurance of the four-man crew. They would be completely exhausted before they ever reached the target. It was a vexing problem, but after much deliberation it was decided that the midgets would be towed to the operational area behind patrol submarines using 200-yard manila or nylon cables. Even under tow, however, the 1,200-mile journey would still take eight days, so passage crews would be trained to ferry the craft to the target area. Then these men would be swapped with the operational crews who would make the voyage in the towing submarines. These transit crews would play a vital, yet largely unsung role in the operation. Theirs would be an exacting, demanding duty in which they were to remain virtually submerged throughout the entire journey, only coming to the surface every six hours for 15 minutes to ventilate their hulls. It promised to be a voyage of incredible hardship, and few envied them. Another critical factor in the planning was the timing of the raid. By early 1943, the Norwegian Battle Group of Tirpitz, the battlecruiser Scharnhorst, and the pocket battleship Lutzow had relocated to new berths within the small landlocked basin of Kaafjord, northern Norway. The German ships were now anchored five degrees north of the Arctic Circle where there was no darkness in summer and no light in winter. Summer was unsuitable for a British attack because the X-craft needed the cover of darkness to recharge their batteries; winter deprived them of daylight to make visual contact with the target. The most favorable times for an attack occurred during the two occasions each year when daylight and darkness were equal, the equinoxes in March and late September. March was too soon, so the Admiralty settled on late September with the attack to go in on September 22. Navy planners had been swayed by intelligence reports from Norwegian agents indicating that on this date the Tirpitzs 15-inch guns would be stripped and cleaned, and her sound detection equipment would be down for routine servicing. Operation Source In June 1943, specialized training for what came to be called Operation Source started in earnest when men and machines moved to the secret wartime base known as Port HHZ in Loch Cairnbawn, northern Scotland. Amid tight security, the Navy had designed a course that replicated the fjord up which the men would travel to attack the Tirpitz and her escorts, Scharnhorst and Lutzow. Now putting their new X-craft through trials, the men vying for selection carried out simulated attacks, rehearsed towing procedures behind larger submarines, and perfected techniques for cutting through antisubmarine nets. The men grew accustomed to the squalid, cramped interior of the vessels, but they never learned to enjoy it. Throughout their arduous training, the strengths and weaknesses of the volunteers were constantly evaluated; everything they did and said during these interminable months played a role in determining who would go and who would be left behind. If the mission were to stand any chance of succeeding, the personnel conducting it would need to be the very best, both mentally and physically. The Navy recognized that a midget submarine would get the men to within striking distance of the Tirpitz, but it would take cold-blooded courage and fierce determination to breach the defenses and sink her. Finally, after nearly 18 months of training, planning, and construction, Operation Source was ready for the ultimate test. The crews had been finalized, and among those selected was a 26-year-old Scotsman, Lieutenant Duncan Cameron, Royal Naval Reserve, whose natural leadership qualities and stout character saw him awarded the command of X-6. Another successful candidate was a 22-year-old veteran of the submarine service, Lieutenant Godfrey Place RN DSC, who took command of X-7. These remarkable men were destined to play pivotal roles in what was to be one of the most daring exploits of the entire war. An Experimental Mission The Admiraltys operational plan called for each pair of submarines to make their way independently to a position west of the Shetland Islands. From this point, they would sail on parallel courses approximately 20 miles apart to the jumping-off point at Soroy Sound, some 11 miles off the Norwegian coast and almost 100 miles from Kaafjord. From this location, the X-craft would negotiate their way independently up Altafjord via Sternsund, cut their way through the nets at the entrance to Kaafjord, and then slip under the enclosures surrounding each of the ships to lay their charges. X-5, X-6, and X-7 would strike at the Tirpitz; X-8 at the Lutzow; and X-9 and X-10 at the Scharnhorst. It was an extraordinary undertaking, but these were extraordinary times and the stakes were high. Shrouded in secrecy, the boats sailed from Loch Cairnbawn behind their parent submarines on the night of September 11-12, 1943. Ahead lay 1,200 long, gray sea miles to Norway. As a select few watched the motley fleet disappear into the gathering darkness they knew that nothing like this had ever been attempted before. They wondered how many, if any, would make it home. Operation Source was, in so many ways, an experimental undertaking. There had been little practical experience to draw upon, and planning staff anticipated the likelihood of mishaps en routethey seemed inevitable. One of the many unknowns involved the reliability of the manila towlines. Nylon was the superior material, but only three were available in time for the mission, and it was hoped that the manila lines would workbut nobody knew for sure. As events transpired, the doubts surrounding their suitability would soon be tragically borne out. A Hazardous Journey to the Target After four uneventful days of passage, the weather began to rapidly deteriorate on September 15. As the larger vessels pounded through the mounting seas, life for the passage crews soon became unbearable. Wretched with debilitating seasickness, the men could neither stand properly nor lie down comfortably as they wrestled around the clock with their charges, which, on the end of their towlines, where being tossed and pitched about like kites in a storm. The stress loads on the cables increased dramatically as the vessels surged as much as 100 feet through the water, and eventually the manila lines to X-8 and X-7 succumbed to the strain and parted. The passage crews in both the X-craft realized almost immediately what had happened and surfaced. It was no easy task to bring them both back under tow with auxiliary lines, and many hours were lost before the journey could continue. The troubles for X-8, however, were far from over as a water leak in the starboard mine gave the vessel a pronounced list. The crew struggled hard to maintain control, but it soon became clear that they would need to jettison the charge and continue with only one. The faulty explosive was put on safe and released to the depths, but a short time later the port mine also developed a leak. With little alternative, it too had to be jettisoned. It exploded prematurely, causing substantial shock damage to the submarines internal systems. With the battered X-8 now unable to dive and close to foundering, the decision was made to scuttle her. The manila tows soon claimed another casualty when the cable to X-9 suddenly snapped. Unlike the previous line failures, this break occurred near the mother ship leaving the full weight of the waterlogged towline hanging off X-9s nose. Already trimmed bow heavy to counteract the upward pull of the parent vessel, X-9 dived out of control to the bottom of the North Sea, taking her transit crew with her. Not only defective equipment threatened to derail the mission. At 0105 on the morning of September 20, Lieutenant Place, who was now aboard X-7, brought the vessel up to ventilate. The towing submarine had also surfaced to find itself on a collision course with a drifting mine. Following evasive action, the crew watched the mine pass by only to see their wake drag the mines mooring line onto the tow cable to X-7. In a few seconds, the lethal charge slid down the hawser and wedged itself in the bow of the X-craft where it bounced up and down with the pitching seas. Lieutenant Place immediately scrambled along the deck casing and, as the wind and spray tore at his clothes, calmly untangled the mooring line from the bow, then deftly kicked the mine clear with his boot. The unwelcome stowaway soon disappeared from view and the voyage resumed. Mechanical Failures and Leaks in the X-Craft By approximately 1800 on September 20, the four remaining X-craft had finally made their landfalls seaward of Soroy Sound as scheduled. Last minute reconnaissance over the target area, however, indicated that neither the Scharnhorst nor Lutzow were in their berths. With X-8 and X-9 already lost, the Admiralty decided that the four remaining submarines were to attack the Tirpitz. By 2000, the X-craft had successfully slipped their tows and set a course for the declared minefield at the entrance to Sternsund. There was no turning back now; they were on their own. With X-6 running on the surface, Lieutenant Cameron took up lookout duty on deck as his craft steadily motored through the short arctic night toward the coast. Skirting the outer rim of the minefield, X-6 passed safely through the first of many obstacles, and soon Cameron could make out the rugged peaks towering on either side of the entrance to Stjernsund, a narrow passage of water leading to Altafjord. The mouth of Stjernsund was protected by shore batteries and torpedo tubes, and with the onset of dawn Cameron submerged to 60 feet and quickly slipped through with the incoming tide. He waited until he was about a mile inside the fjord then cautiously brought X-6 up to periscope depth and scanned the glassy water for any signs of trouble. It was such a beautifully tranquil place that it was hard to believe that violent death could be only a matter of moments away; it was a sobering thought, and Cameron dived and continued his journey concealed in the gloom of the shaded northern shore. So far, everything had gone smoothly, but they all knew the real test was yet to come. The other three X-craft had also passed through the entrance at Stjernsund without difficulty, but water seeping into X-10 caused an electrical short circuit that disabled both her periscope and gyrocompass. Despite valiant efforts to repair the defects, the bitterly disappointed crew realized that, with their craft hopelessly crippled, they were out of the running. To avoid compromising the mission, they would spend the daylight hours of September 22 on the bottom before eventually retracing their steps out of the fjord. The original attacking force of six had now been whittled down to just three, and there were still many hard miles to travel. The crew of X-6 expected to reach the inner end of the waterway near Altaford by last light and planned to spend the night among the Bratholme group of islands to recharge the batteries and prepare for the attack the following morning, September 22. They were making good progress, and despite the rigors of the 1,200-mile journey, X-6 had been handed over in near faultless condition. But, as the day progressed, things started to go awry. A water leak in one of the side charges had steadily worsened, giving the vessel a severe list to starboard, and her automatic helmsmen had broken down, but of most concern was her periscope lens, which had begun to continually flood. The leak was discovered to be outside the hull and unrepairable. The periscope would therefore have to be tediously stripped down and emptied of water after nearly every use. In isolation, the mechanical failures did not present insurmountable problems, but a reliable periscope was essential for Cameron to safely conn the craft up the fjord. Its slender shape had been specially designed to minimize water disturbance, but such a feature counted for nothing if he could not see anything through it. When the action started the following day, he prayed that it would not let him down. Sitting in Enemy Waters With the onset of darkness, X-6 maneuvered into a small, desolate brushwood cove, and while his crew was below preparing for the trials ahead, Cameron climbed out on the deck casing to look around. In the distance, he could see the lights of the large German destroyer base at Lieffsbotun and the town of Alta beyond, but secreted away in their small hideaway it was dark, bitterly cold, and silentor so he thought. Suddenly, not more than 30 yards away, the door to a cabin burst open, bathing the area in bright light. Cameron froze, barely able to breathe, as male voices trailed out over the water. Were they German? Within a few seconds, the door was closed and Cameron was once again swallowed up in the darkness. Quickly recovering from the shock, he decided to find somewhere else to lay up for the night. However, upon leaving the small harbor, X-6 was nearly run down by a fishing boat only to then narrowly avoid another vessel coming from the opposite direction. It was a nerve-wracking experience, and Cameron ensured that their next stopping place was remote and uninhabited. While keeping watch topside in the still arctic night, he reflected on what had been a very eventful 24 hours. It was both surreal and exhilarating to realize that in the midst of the most destructive war the world had ever known, four Royal Navy seamen could actually be sitting squirreled away deep inside an enemy fleet anchorage listening to the BBC and drinking cocoa. The wonder of the moment was shattered at 2100 when a volley of star shells and searchlights erupted from the destroyer base across the water. Had the Germans detected one of their comrades? They waited anxiously for something to happen, but to their relief no alarms were sounded, no engines were heard to start, and soon all was quiet again. Cameron had no idea what the commotion had been about, but he did know that he would be happier once they were on their way. Duncan Camerons Bold Maneuver At 0130 on the morning of September 22, Cameron went over his attack orders once more, then destroyed them. Prior to leaving Scotland, the X-craft commanders had taken precautionary measures to avoid blowing each other up by agreeing to drop their cargoes between 0500 and 0800 with charges set to explode between 0800 and 0900. Cameron planned to unload his bombs at 0630, then retreat out of the fjord, but when he tried to preset the timers he found the fuses on the port side explosive continually shorted out. There was no way of knowing when it would explode. By now the mechanical attrition was sapping the crews confidence, but the young officer was determined to press on. With little discussion, he gave his orders, and at 0145 they set a course for the Tirpitz. The final stage of the attack was underway. The nets covering the mouth of Kaafjord were 158 feet deep and included a 437-yard-wide boom gate fitted near the shallow southern shore. By 0400, X-6 had maneuvered to within half a mile of these formidable defenses, and her diver was suiting up in readiness to cut a hole through the antisubmarine netting. As they closed to within 30 feet of the mesh, the sound of propellers became audible overhead as a Norwegian trawler headed for the boom gate. Cameron realized it must have been open and without hesitation brought X-6 to the surface. The crew could scarcely believe what he was going to do as he maneuvered into the wake of the coaster and with incredible audacity proceeded through the gate in broad daylight. It was a torturous passage as they waited for an alarm to be sounded, but, incredibly, they made it through without detection and immediately dived. They could hardly fathom their luck. Perhaps in the choppy water the Germans mistook the low silhouette of the X-craft for a towed barge or raft. In any case, Camerons bold maneuver had paid off and by guess and by God the small submarine began groping its way up the fjord toward the Tirpitz,which was now only three miles away. Fire on the X-6 Through the faulty periscope, Cameron spied a waterway crammed with German warships of every size, and it was chilling to realize that to reach the Tirpitz he would have to slip right through the middle of them. A tanker sitting at anchor refueling two destroyers lay directly between X-6 and the Tirpitz, and by dead reckoning he set a course that would, in approximately two hours, take them past the tankers stern. It was always going to be a harrowing journey, but the source of most anxiety for the crew arose from the noise generated by the submarines trim pumps. They would have to remain in constant use to maintain the crafts buoyancy in the differing water density, but the sound they emitted was precisely what a hydrophone operator would be listening for. Progress up the fjord was agonizingly slow, but after two hours Cameron expected to be somewhere near the tankers stern and returned to periscope depth to steal a quick look. The hazy image in the lens was enough to send him reeling back in horror; X-6 had surfaced midway between the bow of a destroyer and her mooring buoy. He immediately crash dived to 60 feet, the crew shut down the craft, and they waited. How could they not have been seen or detected by a listening post? These lengthy spells of inactivity punctuated by moments of sheer terror were as taxing on a mans strength as a grueling marathon, but as the minutes ticked by with no German response, Cameron cautiously pressed on again. By 0700, X-6 had come within reach of the battleships antitorpedo netting, but since passing into Kaafjord the submarine had begun to labor severely. She was in fact barely seaworthy. Cameron once again had to come up to periscope depth to gain his bearings. It was an incredible risk in such a small waterway, but at this vital stage it would have been impossible to navigate their way to the Tirpitz by guesswork alone. Through the faulty lens, he could make out the ship, but as he began scanning the water around her, the periscope motor burned out, filling the submarine with choking smoke As X-6 submerged to contain the fire, Cameron sensed the despondencyof the men. They had given their all in unimaginable discomfort for 35 hours straight, but faulty workmanship and defective equipment were undermining their every move. However, the predetermined attack period was fast approaching. Time was now critical. Inside the stifling hot control compartment, heavy with fumes and condensation, stony faces with bloodshot eyes stared at one another in the gloom. They were clearly showing the strain, but nobody could bring themselves to say what they all were thinking. They had no idea how the other X-craft had fared, but if the mechanical defects of X-6 were any indication, they had to assume they were the only ones who had made it this far. Spotted by the Tirpitz Little was said, but clearly no one wanted to admit defeat 46 yards from the ship they had come to destroy; an opportunity like this might never come again. The decision was made to press on, but the crew had no illusions about its chances. Even if they remained undetected, X-6 was in no condition to make good an escape. None of them expected to be leaving Kaafjord. Hugging the north shore, X-6 dived to pass under the nets, which were believed to have been no deeper than 60 feet. But after several attempts at various depths, it was realized that the mesh went all the way to the bottom. The Admiralty intelligence was wrong, and now, at this critical moment, there was no way through. The latest setback came as a body blow, but Cameron, dizzy with fatigue, would not let the mission end like this. His blood was now boiling, and he was determined to find another way in. He brought the vessel to periscope depth once again to check the boat gate located close to the shore and spied a picket launch about to pass through. With a reckless disregard for the danger, Cameron surfaced into the wash of the small boat. The ploy had succeeded at the entrance to Kaafjord, and maybe it would work again. Quickly juggling the pump controls, the crewmen motored through the gate in broad daylight right behind the picket boat, bumping and scraping the bottom as they did. Surely, this time their boldness would be their undoing, but, remarkably, they made it through unnoticed. As the boom gate closed behind them, Cameron took X-6 down into deeper water and set a course that would take them under the stern of the Tirpitz. Like silent assassins sliding through the shadows, they inched their way through the frigid waters to within striking distance of their target. Suddenly the X-6 ran aground and momentarily broke the surface less than 200 yards from the battleship. The disturbance was seen by a lookout, but British luck continued to hold when the sighting was dismissed as being merely a porpoise and no alert was raised. The German sailors on Tirpitz had endured many false alarms over the years and now avoided instigating them for fear of ridicule. Inevitably, though, Camerons run of luck finally ended a few minutes later when X-6 careered into a submerged rock that wrecked the gyrocompass and thrust the vessel to the surface 80 yards abeam of the ship. There was no mistaking what she was this time, but the sighting of X-6 caused considerable confusion aboard the Tirpitz. An incorrect alarm sent men scurrying to secure watertight doors instead of their action stations, and vital minutes were lost before the correct submarine alert was sounded. Even then, few senior officers believed a submarine could have gotten through. The X-craft was too close for the ships big guns to depress sufficiently to engage her, so crewmembers opened fire with small arms and threw grenades. Now the crew of X-6 knew that the Germans were aware of their presence. They no longer had to worry about what might happen; it was now a matter of completing their mission before it did happen. Being in the line of fire threw off the fatigue that had enveloped Camerons men and rekindled their determination to hit back. They too had powerful weapons, and they were now intent on using them. Placing the Charges As bullets churned up the water around the vessel, Cameron quickly dived, but with the periscope now almost completely inoperable and the gyrocompass out of action, he had no idea which way he was heading. Oblivious to the chaos unfolding above him, he blindly groped his way toward what looked like the shadow of the ship but fouled a wire hanging over the side and was stuck fast. After desperate maneuvering, the submarine broke free of the snag only to shoot to the surface again close to the port bow. Undaunted by the hail of bullets once again striking the hull, Cameron took the submarine down and backed her under the Tirpitz where he quickly released the charges beside B Turret. With no hope of escape, the exhausted crew destroyed its secret documents and equipment. As the sailors brought X-6 to the surface to surrender, Cameron ordered her sea cocks opened and her motor left running full astern with the hydroplanes to dive. As they opened the hatch, the firing immediately stopped and the men scrambled onto the deck. A launch from the ship was soon alongside to pick them up, and a German officer tried to secure a tow to the X-craft but the line was hastily cut as the submarine began to sink, almost taking the launch down with her. The four prisoners were taken to the ship, and to the surprise of the Germans, smartly saluted the colors as they stepped onto the deck. Under guard, they stood huddled together looking bedraggled and physically spent, wondering what the future held for them as the minutes ticked by. On the express orders of the Tirpitzs commander, Captain Hans Meyer, the men were immediately given coffee and schnapps. Meanwhile, at almost the same instant Cameron and his crew were scuttling their vessel, Lieutenant Place in X-7 was sitting astern of the Tirpitz, preparing to offload his deadly cargo. Earlier in the morning, he had literally climbed over the nets at Kaafjord but had soon become entangled in the netting around Lutzows empty birth. After struggling desperately for an hour, Place finally broke free only to become entangled in Tirpitzs netting. The violent effort undertaken to break loose had damaged his gyrocompass, and the craft broke the surface at 0710. With the Germans at that moment occupied with X-6, Place was not seen. Diving once again, Place, like Cameron before him, found that the nets went all the way to the bottom, but without realizing it he had fortuitously slipped through an opening on the seabed. By this time he had completely lost his bearings and had come up to periscope depth to discover the Tirpitz only 98 feet away. He immediately submerged and made his run to the target at a depth of 40 feet. Hitting the ship on the port side, the X-7 slipped under her keel. At this point, Place could hear the detonation of grenades around Camerons X-6 but assumed they were meant for him. Sidling along the hull, he placed one charge beneath the bridge and the other near the stern under the aft turrets. Each was set to explode in approximately one hours time. It was now 0720, and Place attempted to escape, but without a compass he would have to guess his way back to the opening on the seabed. Sliding over the top of the first net, he was spotted by the Germans but disappeared from view. After an hour trying to find the opening, he only succeeded in getting himself entangled again. This time he was stuck fast, fully realizing he was about to be destroyed by his own charges. Explosions Under the Tirpitz Aboard the Tirpitz, the Germans had at first refused to accept that Cameron and his crew were British. They suspected them of being Russians and were unwilling to believe they could possibly have come all the way from England to Kaafjord in such a small submarine. Passing crewmembers mocked the prisoners for not having used their torpedoes when they had the chance, but Captain Meyer, who had been studying his captives from the bridge, had grown suspicious. Privately, he greatly admired their courage and daring, but in his mind, they lacked the demeanor of men who had failed. Meyer was soon convinced that they had not been armed with torpedoes but had instead used mines either on the ship or on the seabed. Divers were immediately ordered over the side to check the hull, and attempts were made to move the ship by heaving on the starboard cable and veering on her port to swing the bows away from the likely position of the charges. Meyer had earlier considered taking the ship into the deeper water beyond its enclosure, but the sighting of X-7 outside the nets changed his mind. In any case, it would have taken over an hour to get the ship underway. The prospect of another submarine loose in Kaafjord had caused absolute pandemonium. Cameron and his men had also seen X-7 slide over the top of the nets earlier and had noticed that her mine clamps were empty. As guards herded them below, they could not let on that with eight tons of explosives beneath the ship, this was the last place they wanted to be! A short time later, at 0812, a series of colossal explosions violently heaved Tirpitzs stern six feet out of the water. A German sailor who had also served on the Scharnhorst recalled the moment. Weve had torpedo hits, weve had bomb hits. We hit two mines in the channel, but theres never been an explosion like that. Lights failed, equipment was strewn in every direction, and men were hurled through the air like rag dolls. The four prisoners were dragged back onto the deck to be confronted with utter chaos and panic. The German gun-crew(s), one British sailor later recalled, shot up a number of their own tankers and small boats and also wiped out a gun position inboard with uncontrolled fire. Orders were issued, then countermanded, as officers tried to regain control of the men who were running in all directions. With tensions running high, the mood of the Germans had turned very ugly, and the British seamen were lined up against a bulkhead where an outraged officer, brandishing his pistol, demanded to know how many more submarines there were. When they refused to answer, Cameron was convinced they were about to be shot. It was not until Admiral Oskar Kummetz, the senior naval officer in the region, came aboard to find out what had happened that the situation was defused. He stopped on his way to the bridge, looked over the four bedraggled Englishmen, then curtly told his subordinate to put the pistol away. Trapped in the X-7 Below the waters surface, meanwhile, X-7, instead of being destroyed by the explosion, had been wrenched clear of the netting. Place took her to the bottom to assess the damage but quickly realized that although the pressure hull was intact much of X-7s mechanical controls and internal systems were beyond repair. Place tried to bring her up again but found X-7 was almost uncontrollable as she repeatedly broke the surface and was hit by gunfire from the Tirpitz. With little prospect of escape, Place decided to abandon ship, but he did not expect a warm reception. Surfacing near a moored gunnery target, the small submarine was immediately raked by intense small-arms fire. Place gingerly opened the fore hatch and began waving a white sweater, signaling his intention to surrender, and the firing stopped. As he leaped into the water and swam to the gunnery target, X-7 dipped her bow, allowing water to pour through the open hatch. The vessel quickly sank beneath the surface with three crew members trapped inside. One managed to escape later, but tragically, the other two drowned. Their bodies were later recovered by the Germans and reportedly buried with full military honors. The two survivors of X-7 joined their comrades aboard the Tirpitz but were bitterly disappointed see her still afloat. Following their transfer to the naval prisoner of war camp at Marlag-O, near Bremen, Germany, Cameron and Place, unaware of the damage they had caused, would spend a great deal of time discussing what they could have done to improve the outcome. On the other side of the Atlantic in London, Norwegian agents and Énigma decrypts provided detailed reports on the status of the wounded battleship, and Churchill was delighted. Tirpitz Out of Operation Although Tirpitz had not been eliminated, it was clear that she would be out of action for at least six months. Her four main turrets had been thrown from their roller-bearing mountings, her hull gashed and distorted, all three engines were inoperable, and the port rudder and all three propeller shafts were out of action. Five hundred tons of water had poured into her hull and, although her water integrity held, a number of hull frames were damaged beyond repair. She would in fact remain laid up in Kaafjord until April 1944 and was never to regain complete operational efficiency. So ended the first attack by British midget submarines and the first successful blow against the mighty Tirpitz, but it had come at a cost. All six craft were lost along with nine men killed and six taken prisoner. For their roles in this remarkable operation, described by Rear Admiral C. B. Barry, DSO, as one of the most courageous acts of all time, both Lieutenant Cameron and Lieutenant Place were awarded the Victoria Cross, Britains highest military decoration. Both men remained in the Royal Navy after the war, and Duncan Cameron attained the rank of commander before suddenly dying on active duty in April 1961. He was 44 years old. Godfrey Place retired a rear admiral in 1971 and died peacefully in 1994 at the age of 73. Mystery still surrounds the fate of X-5, commanded by Lieutenant H. Henty-Creer. His vessel was sighted near Kaafjord after the explosion, at 0843, but was raked with heavy fire from Tirpitz and claimed as sunk with all hands. Authorities believed that she had perhaps missed the first specified attack period and laid up in the fjord to plant her charges to follow the initial attack, then make her escape. There are many, however, including the young officers family, who believe that Henty-Creer and his crew had in fact planted their charges before being sunk. They speculate that the sheer force of the detonation beneath the stern of the Tirpitz indicated the presence of considerably more explosive than was deposited by X-6 and X-7 and that the 21-year-old Henty-Creer should have been awarded the Victoria Cross posthumously for his role. The controversy, which has continued since 1945, was reignited in 2003 when local Norwegian divers discovered what appears to be the wreck of X-5 in Kaafjordminus her charges. Were they planted beneath the ship in 1943? Investigators are continuing the search for answers. The fate of the Tirpitz, however, is not in dispute. Her ill-starred career came to an abrupt end in Tromso Fjord on November 12, 1944, when she was attacked by stripped-down British Avro Lancaster bombers using the new 13,000-pound Tallboy bombs. A direct hit triggered a massive explosion in one of her magazines, capsizing the ship and killing over 900 officers and men. After the war, the wreck of what had once been the most powerful battleship in the world was declared the property of the Norwegian government and ingloriously cut up for scrap between 1948 and 1957. Originally Published in 2016. This article by Richard Rule originally appeared on the Warfare History Network.  Image: Wikimedia.  The National Interest
Defense One - All Content: The November Election Is Going to Be a Mess
Disaster is avoidableif lawmakers act now.  Defense One - All Content
Security Boulevard: What Twitter Attack Says on Human Nature, Social Engineering
Last week, Twitter suffered a breach that led to the compromise of numerous high-profile accounts, including those of Barak Obama, Joe Biden, Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk. I took the opportunity to speak with Nir... The post What Twitter Attack Says on Human Nature, Social Engineering appeared first on Security Boulevard.  Security Boulevard
"cia" - Google News: LIPSON: A Put-Up Job: The FBI, CIA, Mueller, and Schiff Investigate Trump-Russia Collusion - Yall Politics
LIPSON: A Put-Up Job: The FBI, CIA, Mueller, and Schiff Investigate Trump-Russia Collusion  Yall Politics  "cia" - Google News
Just Security: The Presidents Private Army
It doesnt take a legal expert to know that whats happening in Portland, Oregon is an abuse of power. When unidentified federal forces dressed as soldiers pull people off the streets into unmarked vans, something is gravely wrong. Whats less apparent is that this abuse is part of an ongoing effort by the administration to get around posse comitatus: the principle that the president cannot use the military as a domestic police force. The implications for the rule of law and potentially for the 2020 election are staggering. The Department of Homeland Security personnel deployed in Portland are federal law enforcement agents, not members of the armed forces. But the evidence is mounting that they are not there to enforce the law. Instead, they are acting as a paramilitary wing to assist the president in his longstanding goal to (in his words) take over U.S. cities run by Democrats. This goal dates back to the beginning of Trumps presidency. Five days after his inauguration, he tweeted: If Chicago doesnt fix the horrible carnage going on, 228 shootings in 2017 with 42 killings (up 24% from 216), I will send in the Feds! (Three and a half years later, hes about to get closer to carrying out his threat: He announced on Wednesday that he will send 200 federal agents to the city, plus 35 additional agents to Albuquerque.) He has issued similar threats periodically throughout his time in office. But it was the protests that erupted across the country in response to the brutal police killing of George Floyd that finally gave the president his chance. At the presidents direction, the governors of 11 states (10 of them Republicans) sent their National Guard units into Washington, DC, where largely peaceful protests had been marred by isolated incidents of violence and looting. The deployment was over the objections of the citys mayor, Muriel Bowser. Congress passed the Posse Comitatus Act to prevent exactly this type of action. The 1878 law bars federal troops from participating in domestic law enforcement activities absent an express authorization by Congress. But the Act applies to the National Guard only when its units are federalized. Even though Guard troops were clearly acting at the direction of the president and secretary of defense, the president did not officially federalize them, leaving them free to conduct law enforcement activities. That gambit served the presidents purposes in DC. But pulling the same trick in a state might be more difficult. Although the administrations legal theory would permit it, the optics of sending one states National Guard forces into another state would likely be more disturbing than sending them to the nations capital. Moreover, governors might be more reluctant to cooperate if another states sovereignty were at stake. So the administration is trying out a new end run around the Posse Comitatus Act. The Department of Homeland Security has sent dozens of agents to Portland to restore order, against the will of Portlands mayor and the governor of Oregon. The official justification for the deployment is to protect federal property, which federal law enforcement agencies may do with or without local authorities consent. But in less scripted moments, the president has blown this cover, repeatedly declaring that hes sending the feds to do the job of local Democratic officials because those officials are doing it so badly. Youre supposed to wait for them to call, but they dont call, he complained. In any case, its fairly obvious that DHS agents arent in Portland simply to protect federal property or personnel. Theyve been recorded driving in areas far from any federal building and apprehending people who are not visibly engaged in any crime, let alone a federal one. In these cases, no charges are brought, no laws enforced. After holding the person for a short but terrifying period of time, the agents release them, leaving no record of the event. What they leave instead is a message of intimidation. This isnt the behavior of a law enforcement agency, state or federal. Its the behavior of a lawless paramilitary force and its no accident that President Trump chose DHS for the job. The department was conceived and structured as a quasi-military agency in the wake of 9/11. This origin story is reflected in its mission (which includes anti-terrorism, border security, and cybersecurity), the military-style weapons and gear it acquires directly from the defense industry, and even its inclusion of one branch of the armed forces (the Coast Guard). The military mindset is particularly strong in Customs and Border Protection. In 2014, the former head of internal affairs at CBP warned that the agency considered itself a paramilitary border security force that operates outside constitutional restraints regarding use of force. CBP has repeatedly demonstrated that its loyalty to President Trump outweighs fidelity to the rule of law. Not coincidentally, the federal agents in Portland were drawn primarily from CBP. As a legal matter, Trumps misuse of federal law enforcement in Portland doesnt violate the Posse Comitatus Act, because the agents are not members of the armed forces. But with DHS acting as a paramilitary force, the deployment nonetheless violates the fundamental principle behind the law. And it highlights the reason that principle exists in the first place: so that the president will not have a personal army at his disposal to take over local governments or to suppress domestic dissent. Congress and the courts must step in. Otherwise, having found his army, Trump is sure to use it again in coming months. Bullying Democratic mayors and governors plays well with his base, whose support was beginning to waver due to Trumps disastrous mishandling of Covid-19. More chilling, he could deploy his paramilitary forces in Democratic strongholds on Election Day as a means of suppressing voter turnout. With DHS acting as a paramilitary force, the deployment violates the fundamental principle behind the law. President Trump has already used federal forces to undermine local sovereignty and the rights of protesters. This practice must be stopped, lest he use these same tactics to undermine our democracy come November. Photo credit: Outside the Multnomah County Justice Center on July 17, 2020 in Portland, Oregon (Mason Trinca/Getty Images) The post The Presidents Private Army appeared first on Just Security.  Just Security
"cia" - Google News: Dont Rush to Judge the CIAs Covert Cyber Offensive - World Politics Review
Dont Rush to Judge the CIAs Covert Cyber Offensive  World Politics Review  "cia" - Google News
"fbi" - Google News: Inside the San Antonio FBI - WOAI
Inside the San Antonio FBI  WOAI  "fbi" - Google News
"International Security" - Google News: Will NATO still be relevant in the future? - Atlantic Council
Will NATO still be relevant in the future?  Atlantic Council  "International Security" - Google News
The National Interest: Pandemic Problem: Trumps Historical Mistake Dooms His Reelection Prospects
Amitai Etzioni Politics, Americas The president prioritized the economy over his peopleand he will pay for that at the polls. Social scientists like myself tend to play down the role of personalities in history, instead paying more mind to social forces. They scoff at the medias penchant for according headline treatment to every small move and utterance by the head of state. President Donald Trump is forcing me, and maybe quite a few of my colleagues, to reconsider that position. His unique personality has surprisingly great effects on the nations course and even its institutions. Following his instincts has served him well so far. However, these very instincts are causing him to make a major misjudgment, one so colossal that it will end up defining his presidency. Initially, social scientists tended to view Trumps rise and presidency mainly as an expression of the resentments of the segment of the population that is white, working-class, and without a college education (which tends to make graduates more liberal). This group of people came to view themselves as a persecuted minority, deprived of their rights by affirmative action, immigrants, and an overbearing government. Sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild spent five years living with and studying Tea Party voters in Louisiana, many of whom later became Trump voters. She has shared her findings in Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right. She asked those she interviewed what they felt about the following narrative: You are patiently standing in the middle of a long line stretching toward the horizon, where the American Dream awaits. But as you wait, you see people cutting in line ahead of you. Many of these line-cutters are blackbeneficiaries of affirmative action or welfare. Some are career-driven women pushing into jobs they never had before. Then you see immigrants, Mexicans, Somalis, the Syrian refugees yet to come. As you wait in this unmoving line, youre being asked to feel sorry for them all. . . . The government has become an instrument for redistributing your money to the undeserving. Its not your government anymore; its theirs.   The interviewees offered minor adjustments, however, they emphatically stated that the narrative accurately described their feelings. Also, these Americans felt snubbed by the liberal elites, not without reason. They have not forgotten that Hillary Clinton called them deplorable. Long before Trump, they had media demagogues, like Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, and Bill OReilly, egging them on.   This group of Americans comprise at least a third of the public, and many others share some of their sentiments. Trump did not study this group nor develop a strategy to appeal to them. He speaks for them, in their voice, instinctually. He seems to share many of their feelings and amplifies them with a daily stream of statements that legitimate their biases, further supported by Fox News and others in the rightwing media. Trump has made views once whispered about over the dinner table, after the guests were gone, into statements that a person can safely shout from rooftops, conspiracy theories included. (Some of this shift can be traced to technology, particularly to the rise of social media, as chronicled in Antisocial: Online Extremists, Techno-Utopians, and the Hijacking of the American Conversation, by Andrew Marantz.)   Over the course of his presidency, however, it has become ever more evident that Trump is doing much more than giving a voice to White people who consider themselves a deprived minority. He has been using the decades-long growth in presidential powers, and the diminished checking powers of Congress and the courts, to introduce major changes in the way the United States is governederoding the guardrails of democracy.   Historians may have downplayed how Trump undermined American democracy, had he taken charge of the fight against the coronavirus, saved many thousands of lives, and curbed the economic devastation. I predict that Trump increased the harm and that fact will take top billing. It will be an account of a president whose instincts served him well until they led him to make a mistake of truly historical proportionsnamely, his decision to grant priority to reviving the economy over fighting the pandemic. This mistake is a result of Trumps tendency to view the world through the lens of a businessman, leading him to assume that a humming economy is more important than public health.   Trumps tendency to view the world through dollar signs is well known. Thus, his main interest in the large-scale military exercises the United States conducts each year with South Korea has not been their effects on U.S. relations with North Koreaor whether they are needed in the first placebut what they cost. Trumps main concern about NATO has not been whether it needs beefing up (given increased Russian assertiveness) or whether it has outgrown its usefulness. His main interest was ensuring that the US pays less, and EU nations pay more, for NATO upkeep. In dealing with China, Trump tends to focus on trade rather than on the question of whether we should veer into a Cold War with this rising superpower or seek to collaborate with it, especially in fighting the pandemic. In a recent tweet about removing troops from Afghanistan, he suggested that the Taliban actually wants the U.S. troops to stay in their country because the Taliban is making money off the U.S. presence!  After U.S. intelligence agencies, the State Department, the Defense Department, and Trumps leading trade adviser, Peter Navarro, warned him about the coming pandemic in January, Trump famously decided to play it down. When Trump finally agreed to support policies to attempt to curb the pandemic, he did so reluctantly and halfheartedly. He left it to the governors to take the main lead. Within weeks, he started pushing to reopen the economy, well before testing and contact tracing had reached the necessary levels for safe opening. With this decision, Trump is drawing on his instinct that his political future will depend on the state of the economy rather than that of public health. It is a misjudgment of such a magnitude that it may well play a key role when historians judge his administration, as it will cost many American lives.   My prediction is based on the fact that those leaders of other nations who took early and firm steps to fight the pandemic, whatever the economic costs, are doing very well politically. A telling example is the Prime Minister of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu, whose popularity was declining before the pandemic broke. He is widely credited with locking down Israel early and introducing widespread testing and contact tracing, resulting in a very low level of death, though he seems to have reopened too quickly. The same holds for German chancellor Angela Merkel, whose approval rating rose from 53 percent (in February) to 68 percent (in May); New Zealands Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, who has an 87 percent approval rating for her response to the pandemic; and South Korean president Moon Jae-in, among others. All these countries have suffered some setbacks recently but still are doing vastly better than the United States. The same point is also supported by the high popularity of governors who took early and tough measures against the pandemic and stayed the course, such as New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who has an 81 percent approval rating for his handling of crisis; Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine, who has an 86 percent approval rating for his response to the pandemic; and Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer. Those who played down the pandemic and let the economy reign are faring much less well. This is especially true for the president of Brazil, Jair Bolsonaro, whose approval rating is a low 39 percent. The approval rating of Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp is the same. Trump has a  43 percent approval rating for his handling of the pandemic.   Oddly, even now, it may not be too late. If Trump did an I have been lost but now I have been found turnabout; admit that he underestimated the challenge we face but now see it.  Wear a mask and state that he views wearing it as a sign of good fellowship; work with Congress to bring about massive testing and contract tracing (programs he now is seeking to cut); order corporations to manufacture medical supplies we still short; and let the virus tell us when we can open the economy, as White House coronavirus advisor Anthony Fauci puts itquite a few voters may return to the fold. But Trump seems so keen on disrupting, that he has settled on the ultimate target, himself.   As I see it, there is no way on earth for Trump to get most people back to work and make the economy hum within the next few months. One must take into account that many voters make up their minds long before November and tend to judge the state of affairs by what they are experiencing, rather than what politicians tell them the economy is doing or will do next year. It is impossible to run an alternative history to establish what Trumps standing would have been if he had chosen to lead the fight against the pandemic. But one can imagine that, if he followed the course of others who chose to take a strong proactive and public-health-centered approach (and if he miraculously showed some true empathy for all those who mourn and suffer), it is quite possible that many who are critical of many of his other actions may have forgiven him and voted for him.   I am not arguing that Trumps historical mistake dooms his reelection prospects. However, if he does win, his victory may be less attributable to his instincts than to other maneuverings, such as voter suppression, which is in full force. To give just one example: in 2018, Florida voters overwhelmingly passed a ballot measure restoring the voting rights of some 1.4 million people who had finished their felony sentences. However, in 2019, the state enacted a law compelling these people to pay all fees, fines, and other financial obligations before they can vote, a provision that in effect disenfranchises most of them. This action, in effect, has just gained the approval of the Supreme Court. Scores of other voter suppression drives are taking place in various states (for details see Emily Bazelons article in the New York Times Magazine). Also, Trump has all the advantages of a head of state. And he may benefit from the fact that Americans are learning to normalize coronavirus deaths, treating them increasingly the way we tolerate traffic fatalities, as the price we are willing to pay to zip around freely on our thoroughfares   If Trump is reelected, nevertheless, history may well say it was despite his strategic mistake, which will be impossible to forgive or forget.  Amitai Etzioni is a University Professor and professor of international affairs at The George Washington University. His latest book,Reclaiming Patriotism, was published by the University of Virginia Press in 2019 and is available fordownload without charge.  Image: Reuters  The National Interest
"International Security" - Google News: Whos afraid of Chinas big bad wolf warriors? - The Australian
Whos afraid of Chinas big bad wolf warriors?  The Australian  "International Security" - Google News
Window on Eurasia -- New Series: Kremlin Now Using Third-Party Lawsuits to Bankrupt Those who Oppose It, Agora Report Says
Paul Goble             Staunton, July 22 The Kremlin has found a new wave to go after its political opponents: using suits by third parties to bankrupt and thus hobble them, even as the powers that be maintain plausible deniability that they are not involved in this latest move to destroy civil society in the Russian Federation.             This new tactic has been adopted because Russian society has shown that it is willing to help finance opposition groups even as their access to funds from abroad have been choked off, and it has been used both in the case of Aleksey Navalnys Foundation for the Struggle with Corruption and Olga Romanovas Sitting Russia which sought to help prisoners.             According to Russian commentator Ivan Preobrazhensky, officials in the Kremlin are certain that they have found a universal method of suppressing civic activity and struggling against the extra-systemic opposition, one that resembles what Putin did against independent media two decades ago and that gives him deniability (dw.com/ru/комментарий-закрытие-фбк-или-как-надежно-вытравить-оппозицию-в-россии/a-54253262).             Preobrazhenskys disturbing conclusions arise from a study how the powers that be have moved against Navalny that was prepared by the Agora human rights organization. The full study is available at agora.legal/fs/a_delo2doc/199_file_v1.pdfand is discussed at zona.media/article/2020/07/22/agora-fbk).             Using nominally third-party suits against opposition groups, of course, is only an additional arrow in the Kremlins quiver. It continues to arrest and harass opponents in other ways (zona.media/article/2020/07/21/obysk). But because of the deniability it provides, this hybrid attack may prove effective if Russians and the West fail to see it for what it is.  Window on Eurasia -- New Series
"russia" - Google News: Russia c.bank chief gives online press conference after rate decision - Reuters UK
Russia c.bank chief gives online press conference after rate decision  Reuters UK  "russia" - Google News

Feed Integration by RSS Dog.

______________________________________________________

Saved Stories – 250 |  Saved Stories – 25 – Page | Trump Investigations on RSS Dog 

Trump and Trumpism – Review Of News And Opinions: 7:53 AM 7/2/2019 – Michael Novakhov – SharedNewsLinks℠: 6:58 AM 7/2/2019 – “Fear, and the paralysis…”: Trump corruption investigators risk jobs, reputations for seeking truth – By Michael J. Stern | Trump and Trumpism – Review Of News And Opinions – Topic Review: New Abwehr, WW2, Japan, Korea 

_______________________________________

Douglas Leff: Brief Psychological Portrait as the impressions from the photograph. – By Michael Novakhov – 10:18 AM 8/6/2019

Tuesday August 6th, 2019 at 10:30 AM

The FBI News Review

1 Share

Did Douglas Leff Manufacture The Case Of Julia Keleher, and why? – Google Search

Douglas Leff: Brief Psychological Portrait as the impressions from the photograph. – By Michael Novakhov – 10:18 AM 8/6/2019 – Post Link Michael_Novakhov shared this story .

PAGES – TRUMPANDTRUMPISM.COM

• 1. Front Pages – trumpandtrumpism.com – Home
  • 1. All News Review In 25 Saved Stories – Front Page
  • 1. All News Review In 25 Saved Stories – trumpandtrumpism.com – Front Page
    • All Saved Stories – In 50 Brief Posts
    • All Saved Stories In Brief – 250
    • Saved Stories – 250
  • 1. NewsLinks℠ – Review – Front Page: In 25 Full and 250 Brief Posts – trumpandtrumpism.com
    • 1. NewsLinks In 10 Brief Posts – Front Page
    • 1. NewsLinks℠ – from Michael Novakhov – In 50 Brief Posts – Front Page
    • NewsLinks from Michael Novakhov
  • 1. Saved Stories – In 50 Posts – Front Page
  • 1. SharedNewsLinks℠ – TrumpAndTrumpism.com – Front Page – In 25 Full Posts
    • Michael Novakhov – SharedNewsLinks℠ – In 50 Posts
    • Mike Nova’s Shared NewsLinks Review In 250 Brief Posts – trumpandtrumpism.com
  • 1. SharedNewsLinks℠ – trumpandtrumpism.com – Front Page: In 1 Full and 20 Brief Posts
  • 1. Side Panel – Global Security Review – globalsecurityreview.org – 11:33 AM 10/9/2019
  • 1. Side Panel – TIMESPR.ORG – 10:54 AM 10/9/2019
  • 1. Side Panel – NEWS-LINKS.ORG – 11:12 AM 10/9/2019
  • 1. Side Panel – TRUMPISMANDTRUMP.COM – 12:12 PM 10/9/2019
  • 1. Trump News Review – In Brief Posts – trumpandtrumpism.com – Front Page
    • 1. Trump News Review – trumpandtrumpism.com – Front Page
  • 1.3 Links and Pages – The News and Times – Front Pages
  • Trump Investigations News Review In Brief | Shared Links
• 1. Side Panel – FBIREFORM.ORG – 10:30 AM 10/9/2019
• 1. Side Panel – jibaronews.com – 9:51 AM 10/9/2019
• 2. Shared Links – trumpandtrumpism.com
  • Links and Recent Posts
  • Mueller Report In Video, Audio, and Searchable PDF
  • Shared Links
    • Saved Stories – Shared Links
  • Shared Links In Brief
• 3. News Reviews
  • 1. World News Review
  • All News Topics Alerts – 250
  • Featured Posts: Category: News Review
  • News Review: Selected Posts – Saved and Shared Stories, and Tweets

All News Review In 25 Saved Stories