→ BioNTech, the German company that co-produced the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine, is implicated in efforts to sabotage a World Health Organization-sponsored initiative to establish mRNA vaccine production in Africa. The unusual decision from the Biden administration is an attempt to avoid being seen giving money to the Taliban, but it deprives Afghanistan of money that was originally accumulated to forestall the kind of dire humanitarian crisis Afghans now face. The assets were frozen last August when the Taliban seized control of the country and effectively constituted an emergency reserve fund for Afghanistan. → Rather than releasing the $7 billion in Afghan assets now frozen by the United States, President Biden signed an executive order Friday morning authorizing a plan to split the money between humanitarian aid for the country and a compensation fund for Sept. The move announced Thursday by French President Emmanuel Macron comes as Europe faces a severe energy crunch and rising prices for oil and natural gas exacerbated by the conflict with Russia, the continent’s main supplier. → While Germany is in the process of decommissioning all of its nuclear facilities, France has just opted to build six new nuclear reactors with another eight possibly coming after. Macron refused to take a test, fearing that the pleasure of shaking Putin’s hand and sitting by his side would come at the expense of having his DNA stolen by the Russian government. The distance, however, was in fact social-the result of Macron refusing to take a Russian PCR test, forcing the leaders to adhere to stringent social distancing guidelines. Some interpreted this as a power play from Putin, the Russian leader seeking to demonstrate the distance between his position and Macron’s. → When Emmanuel Macron and Vladimir Putin sat to discuss Russian hostilities on the Russia-Ukraine border, they did so from opposite ends of a 13-foot table. knowledge that “a final decision has been taken by Putin” but urged any Americans left in Ukraine to leave the country in the next 48 hours. White House National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan denied any U.S. intelligence sources circulated reports that Russian President Vladimir Putin had committed to invading Ukraine and decided on next week as the date to launch a large-scale conventional assault. Meanwhile, there were mixed signals from Washington, D.C. Rather than being a warning or sending a signal, the Israelis pulling their people out of Kyiv suggests they may believe some kind of fighting is imminent in Ukraine. While this comes after the United States and some European countries issued similar orders for staff to leave the country, there was an element of public diplomacy and symbolism in those cases that is missing here. → Israel began the evacuation of nonessential staff from Ukraine Friday. ![]() “FISA gets all the attention,” Senators Wyden and Heinrich said in a statement released Thursday, “but what these documents demonstrate is that many of the same concerns that Americans have about their privacy and civil liberties also apply to how the CIA collects and handles information under executive order and outside the FISA law.” Because the spying uncovered by the senators was authorized through the executive order, it did not require any warrants and was done “entirely outside the statutory framework that Congress and the public believe govern this collection, and without any of the judicial, congressional, or even executive branch oversight that comes from FISA collection.” ![]() This gets complicated, as matters dealing with secret intelligence programs always do, but essentially what happened is this: First a government watchdog group called the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board that was charged with investigating the intelligence agency operations authorized by Executive Order (EO) 12333-the statute under which most foreign surveillance takes place-issued a report titled “Deep Dive II.” The report remains fully classified, but we now have a heavily redacted version of the letter that Wyden and Heinrich wrote in response to the report, and although it contains no details about the nature of the CIA’s program or the sources the program was collecting from-most likely internet providers and telecommunications companies-it does make clear that the surveillance took place outside the oversight of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISA) and was only done through the EO. The few details that we now have about the program came to light as a result of a partially declassified letter written in April 2021 by two members of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Ron Wyden (D-OR) and Martin Heinrich (D-NM), and released to the public Thursday. Yet again, the Central Intelligence Agency has been caught running a secret bulk surveillance program that includes collecting information on American citizens.
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