The Kremlin’s Plot against Democracy | How Viruses Shape the World | Child Separation, and more

·  “Future elections in the United States and other democracies will face an onslaught of disinformation and conspiracy theories emanating not just from Russia but also from China, Iran, Venezuela and beyond. … The Russian playbook has been copied by others, but it has also evolved, in large part thanks to Moscow’s own innovations. After social media companies got better at verifying accounts, for instance, Russia began looking for ways to roll out its campaigns without relying on fake online profiles.” 

·  “A barrage of attacks, combined with the increasingly sophisticated methods used to avoid detection, could leave governments, social media companies and researchers scrambling to catch up. The United States is woefully underprepared for such a scenario, having done little to deter new attacks.

·  It is late, but not too late, to shore up U.S. defenses in time for the November election. The focus should be Russia, given its status as the main originator and innovator of disinformation operations.”

The Trump Campaign Accepted Russian Help to Win in 2016. Case Closed. (The Editorial Board, New York Times)
“Cooperation” or “collusion” or whatever. It was a plot against American democracy.
From the start, the Trump-Russia story has been both eye-glazingly complex and extraordinarily simple.
….
A bipartisan report released Tuesday by the Republican-controlled Senate Intelligence Committee cuts through the chaff. The simplicity of the scheme has always been staring us in the face: Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign sought and maintained close contacts with Russian government officials who were helping him get elected. The Trump campaign accepted their offers of help. The campaign secretly provided Russian officials with key polling data. The campaign coordinated the timing of the release of stolen information to hurt Hillary Clinton’s campaign.
The Senate committee’s report isn’t telling this story for the first time, of course. (Was it only a year ago that Robert Mueller testified before Congress about his own damning, comprehensive investigation?) But it is the first to do so with the assent of Senate Republicans, who have mostly ignored the gravity of the Trump camp’s actions or actively worked to cast doubt about the demonstrable facts in the case.
….
It’s also a timely rebuke to the narrative that Attorney General William Barr has been hawking since before he took office early last year — that “Russiagate” is a “bogus” scandal. Mr. Barr and other Trump allies claim that the Russia investigation was begun without basis and carried out with the intent of “sabotaging the presidency.” That argument has been debunked by every investigative body that has spent any time looking into what happened, including the nation’s intelligence community, Mr. Mueller’s team, the Justice Department’s inspector general and now the Senate Intelligence Committee.
….
But call it whatever you like: The Intelligence Committee report shows clear coordination between Russians and the Trump campaign, though there is no evidence of an explicit agreement. The evidence the report lays out suggests Mr. Trump knew this at the time. Whether or not it can be proved that he ordered this interference or violated the law in doing so, the fact remains that neither he nor anyone else in his campaign alerted federal law-enforcement authorities, as any loyal American should have.
….
Russia is now attempting to help Mr. Trump again this November, according to American intelligence assessments reported in The Times. For any normal president, that would be a top-of-mind concern, and he or she would be marshaling all available resources to thwart it. What has Mr. Trump done? On Sunday night, he retweeted Russian propaganda that the U.S. intelligence community had already flagged as part of that country’s efforts to skew the election.

How Viruses Shape the World (Economist)
They don’t just cause pandemics.

Suffering in the Sahel: A Coup in Mali Is Unlikely to Make Matters Better (Economist)
Western countries cannot solve African crises with military support alone.

Homeland Security Testing Lab Wants to Hear about the Best Temperature Screening Tools in the Market (Aaron Boyd, Nextgov)
The tools will be assessed and included on a list of recommended products for federal and local emergency responders and law enforcement.

Trump Cabinet Officials Voted in 2018 White House Meeting to Separate Migrant Children, Say Officials (Julia Ainsley and Jacob Soboroff, NBC News)
“If we don’t enforce this, it is the end of our country as we know it,” said Trump adviser Stephen Miller, according to officials present at a White House meeting.