Two Big News Stories You May Have Missed; Extreme Heat Is Challenging Infrastructure–Coachella Valley Independent’s Indy Digest: Aug. 5, 2024

Indy Digest: Aug. 5, 2024

There is a LOT going on, news-wise. Today alone, there’s been the massive stock market freakout, a possible upcoming attack by Iran on Israel, a landmark antitrust ruling against Google, etc.

However, I’d like to use this space to point out two big news stories that you may have missed.

First: A number of anti-Islam, anti-immigrant violent incidents have taken place in the United Kingdom over the last week. ABC News explains what’s been going on:

Britain has been convulsed by violence for the past week as crowds spouting anti-immigrant and Islamophobic slogans clashed with police. The disturbances have been fueled by right-wing activists using social media to spread misinformation about a knife attack that killed three girls during a Taylor Swift-themed dance event.

The violence, some of Britain’s worst in years, has led to hundreds of arrests as the government pledges that the rioters will feel “the full force of the law” after hurling bricks and other projectiles at police, looting shops and attacking hotels used to house asylum-seekers.

Let me repeat a key part of that second sentence: The disturbances have been fueled by right-wing activists using social media to spread misinformation.

As for what’s been going on:

More than a dozen towns and cities have been caught up in the unrest including London, Hartlepool, Manchester, Middlesborough, Hull, Liverpool, Bristol, Belfast, Nottingham and Leeds.

Some of the worst violence occurred Sunday, when hundreds of rioters stormed a Holiday Inn Express housing asylum-seekers in the town of Rotherham, outside Birmingham. Police in riot gear were pelted with bricks and chairs as they tried to defend the hotel from attackers who kicked in windows and pushed a burning wheelie bin inside. Hours later, another group attacked a hotel in Tamworth, 70 miles to the south.

Agitators are exploiting long-simmering tensions over immigration and, more recently, the growing number of migrants who have entered the country illegally by crossing the English Channel in inflatable boats.

Awful. Just awful.

Next up is a story The Washington Post ran on Friday; headlined “$10M cash withdrawal drove secret probe into whether Trump took money from Egypt.”

Five days before Donald Trump became president in January 2017, a manager at a bank branch in Cairo received an unusual letter from an organization linked to the Egyptian intelligence service. It asked the bank to “kindly withdraw” nearly $10 million from the organization’s account—all in cash.

Inside the state-run National Bank of Egypt, employees were soon busy placing bundles of $100 bills into two large bags, according to records from the bank. Four men arrived and carried away the bags, which U.S. officials later described in sealed court filings as weighing a combined 200 pounds and containing what was then a sizable share of Egypt’s reserve of U.S. currency.

Federal investigators learned of the withdrawal, which has not been previously reported, early in 2019. The discovery intensified a secret criminal investigation that had begun two years earlier with classified U.S. intelligence indicating that Egyptian President Abdel Fatah El-Sisi sought to give Trump $10 million to boost his 2016 presidential campaign, a Washington Post investigation has found. …

Within months of learning of the withdrawal, prosecutors and FBI agents were blocked by top Justice Department officials from obtaining bank records they believed might hold critical evidence, according to interviews with people familiar with the case as well as documents and contemporaneous notes of the investigation. The case ground to a halt by the fall of 2019 as Trump’s then-attorney general, William P. Barr, raised doubts about whether there was sufficient evidence to continue the probe of Trump.

I understand that we’ve all become immune to the never-ending flood of accusations against the former president—but, seriously, think about this one: A foreign government may have given Donald Trump $10 million in cash as a bribe, more or less, and the Justice Department blocked agents and prosecutors from looking into the possibility.

This would have been a huge, gargantuan story if it had involved any other U.S. president or major presidential candidate over the last century or so. But today, in 2024 … it’s not even front-page news in most newspapers.

—Jimmy Boegle

More News

• A professor of civil engineering, writing for The Conversation, says extreme heat is taking a big toll on the United States’ aging infrastructure: “Summer 2024’s record heat is creating problems for transportation infrastructure, from roads to rails. New York’s Third Avenue Bridge, which swings open for ship traffic on the Harlem River, was stuck for hours after its metal expanded in the heat and it couldn’t close. Roads have buckled on hot days in several states, including Washington and Wisconsin. Amtrak warned passengers to prepare for heat-related problems hours before a daylong outage between New York and New Jersey; the risks to power lines and rails during high temperatures are a growing source of delays for the train system. It doesn’t help that the worsening heat is hitting a U.S. infrastructure system that’s already in trouble. The American Society of Civil Engineers gave U.S. infrastructure an overall grade of C- in its latest national Infrastructure Report Card, released in 2021.”

• The Los Angeles Times reports that the current COVID-19 surge in California shows no signs of letting up very soon: “California’s summer COVID surge has proved to be particularly strong and enduring, surprising experts with its tenacity as it storms into a third month. The strength of this summer’s COVID surge probably is largely related to the ever-more infectious subvariants that continue to emerge as the coronavirus evolves, said Dr. Elizabeth Hudson, regional chief of infectious disease at Kaiser Permanente Southern California. A dizzying number of related subvariants—collectively dubbed FLiRT—have emerged in recent months. One in particular, KP.3.1.1, has been picking up steam at a startling pace and has become the most common strain nationwide. … While hospitalizations overall remain a fraction of those seen during earlier COVID summertime spikes, hospitalizations and emergency room visits have been ticking up, and clinics are seeing high numbers of infected patients. ‘This is not a benign wave,’ wrote Dr. Eric Topol, director of the Scripps Research Translational Institute in La Jolla, in a blog post published Saturday. ‘It’s a major wave now … we haven’t yet reached the plateau.’”

• A lot of businesses are going cashless—and this presents a problem for the surprisingly high number of Americans who don’t have a bank account. CNBC reports: “About 6% of Americans were unbanked in 2023, meaning they’re living without access to any traditional financial services such as savings accounts, credit cards or personal checks, according to data from the Federal Reserve. This share of the population grows to 23% when only considering people making less than $25,000. The unbanked are more vulnerable to predatory lending practices and their cash is more at risk, financial experts say. This issue disproportionately affects Black and Hispanic adults, Fed data shows, putting financial institutions and local organizations in a position to build trust within marginalized communities. ‘Oftentimes the most vulnerable among us, who need the resources most efficiently, aren’t able to get access,’ said Wole Coaxum, CEO of MoCaFi, a fintech company serving the unbanked and underbanked.”

• The state of California is considering a ban on book bans. Our partners at Calmatters report: “The presentation was unassuming, just a handful of picture books arrayed on the side of a bookcase—the ABCs of a Pride parade, biographies of the gay World War II codebreaker Alan Turing and 50 LGBTQ+ people who made history, the sex education manual ‘It’s Perfectly Normal,’ a retelling of the Stonewall riot and ‘My Shadow Is Pink,’ in which a young boy explores his gender identity. But when Fresno County Supervisor Steve Brandau heard a complaint from a constituent that Clovis librarians had put together a graphic Pride Month display for the children’s section, he was concerned enough to check it out. It wasn’t the type of material that he thought should be available alongside books about skunks and pirates. … Now the book battle has become another front in the intensifying clashes between more conservative pockets of California and the state’s liberal government over values and local control. A bill on track to pass the Legislature before the session ends on Aug. 31 would effectively outlaw book review committees and other policies that limit access to materials at public libraries—potentially shutting down Fresno County’s efforts before they ever get off the ground.”

• Drug-store chains are struggling—and they’re experimenting with different formulas in an effort to win customers back. The Associated Press says: “Customers may see Walgreens stores that are one-fourth the size of a regular location or CVS drugstores with entire primary clinics stuffed inside. If these experiments succeed, the new stores might improve access to care and create a more lasting connection with customers, analysts say. … Walgreens CEO Tim Wentworth said recently that his company could close a ‘significant portion’ of underperforming stores in the next few years. CVS Health is going through a round of closings. Rite Aid has filed for bankruptcy. Thousands of independent drugstores have closed over the past five years. The closures can leave gaps: An Associated Press analysis published in June found that urban neighborhoods that are majority Black and Latino have fewer pharmacies per capita than white majority neighborhoods.”

• And finally … the headline says “In Los Angeles, Your Chic Vacation Rental May Be a Rent-Controlled Apartment.” Yes, really. Capital and Main teams up with ProPublica to report: “L.A.’s zoning laws have long prohibited turning apartments into hotel rooms, with a few exceptions. But in 2018, the City Council handed inspectors a new enforcement tool, an ordinance that specifically outlawed using rent-controlled dwellings for short-term rentals. …  Landlords are using rent-controlled apartments as vacation rentals in apparent violation of the law, an investigation by Capital & Main and ProPublica has found. In some cases, entire apartment buildings with more than 30 units are listed as boutique hotels on sites like Hotels.com and Booking.com. By analyzing city databases and combing through online listings, the news organizations found 63 rent-controlled buildings where a tourist could book a room this spring. The number is likely far higher because many vacation rental websites like Airbnb don’t list exact addresses.”

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