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From the early days in the 1800s on, there has been continuing controversy over immigration policy and bias, from nationality to religion. And, I believe, the process to become a U.S. citizen should be conducted in an organized, thoughtful and legal manner.

Does the ongoing campaign to unionize the Amazon warehouse, where 85 percent of the workers are Black, portend a return to large-scale campaigns in the region?

As billions flow to the Gateway Program’s Hudson River megaproject for new bridges and tunnels, an audit finds that Amtrak has serious work to do—in-house.

The energy transition is already here, but so are midterm-killing gas increases. Climate hawks are winning the war and losing the battle.

by Steven Lee Myers and Paul Mozur, The New York Times, and Jeff Kao, ProPublica

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published.

This story was co-published with The New York Times.

Read in Chinese • 阅读简体中文版

Inside the Potemkin village of China’s propaganda, the Winter Olympics have unfolded as an unalloyed success, a celebration of sports and political harmony that has obscured — critics say whitewashed — the country’s flaws and rights abuses.

At Beijing 2022, the hills are snowy, not brown as usual this time of year. A Uyghur skier is the symbol of national unity, the tennis player Peng Shuai just a curious spectator. Athletes and foreign journalists praise the polite volunteers and marvel at the high-speed trains and the robots that boil dumplings and mix drinks.

While China’s control of what its domestic viewers and readers consume is well established, the country has spread its own version of the Games beyond its borders, with an arsenal of digital tools that are giving China’s narrative arguably greater reach and subtlety than ever before.

With bots, fake accounts, genuine influencers and other tools, China has been able to selectively edit how the events have appeared, even outside the country, promoting everything that bolsters the official, feel-good story about the Winter Olympics and trying to smother whatever doesn’t.

“For the Chinese Communist Party, the Winter Olympics are inseparable from the broader political goal of building up the country’s national image,” said David Bandurski, director of the China Media Project, a monitoring organization. Referring to the country’s leader, he added: “This is what Xi Jinping has called ‘telling China’s story well.’”

On Twitter, which is banned in China, Chinese state media outlets and journalists, as well as diplomats, have tried to buff the image of the Games, raving about venues and cooing over the Olympic mascot.

An account called Spicy Panda used artificially boosted posts to accuse the United States of attempting to “stain the Olympics.” Notations were added by ProPublica. (Screenshot from Twitter by ProPublica)

China has also sought to influence online discussions in more concealed ways. The New York Times and ProPublica identified a network of more than 3,000 inauthentic-looking Twitter accounts that appeared to be coordinating to promote the Olympics by sharing state media posts with identical comments, for instance. Such accounts tended to be recently created with very few followers, tweeted mostly reposts and nothing of their own, and appeared to operate solely to amplify official Chinese voices.

Some of their efforts have centered on an account called Spicy Panda, which has been posting cartoons and videos to push back against calls for a boycott of the Olympics. In one cartoon, Spicy Panda accused the United States of wielding “its deceiving propaganda weapon to stain the Olympics.”

The tweet was reposted 281 times, all by the fake-looking accounts, but received little other engagement, a strong indication that the network was mobilized to promote the message. Aside from the bursts of promotion, Spicy Panda’s posts about the Olympics received almost no attention.

Watch video ➜

An analysis of Spicy Panda’s supporters turned up 861 accounts — 90% of which were created after Dec. 1. The accounts’ first wave of coordinated posts pushed Beijing’s stance that Hong Kong’s Legislative Council elections were legitimate, though critics have called the vote a sham. Then the accounts turned their attention to the Olympics. (By Thursday, all but one of the accounts had been suspended, shortly after the Times and ProPublica asked Twitter about them.)

Posts by Spicy Panda received hundreds of reposts but little other engagement, strongly suggesting coordinated promotion. Notations were added by ProPublica. (Screenshots from Twitter by ProPublica)

Spicy Panda appears to have a connection with iChongqing, a state media-linked multimedia platform based in Chongqing, a city in central China. The accounts that shared Spicy Panda’s posts often did the same with the tweets by iChongqing’s account. IChongqing did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Other botlike accounts promoted hashtags that seemed aimed at drowning out criticism of China, a hallmark of previous campaigns.

They promoted content under hashtags like #Beijing2022 and #TogetherForASharedFuture, this year’s official Olympic motto. Some accounts repeatedly posted tweets with identical wording, such as: “China’s hosting of the #Beijing2022 as scheduled has boosted the world’s confidence in defeating the pandemic.”

Twitter said in an emailed statement that it had suspended hundreds of the accounts identified by the Times and ProPublica for violations of its platform manipulation and spam policies. It said it was continuing to investigate the accounts’ links to state-backed information operations.

Beijing's Olympic mascot Bing Dwen Dwen. (Photo by Lian Zhen/Xinhua via Getty Images)

Even the Games’ official mascot, Bing Dwen Dwen, a cuddly panda in a suit of ice, has been the subject of an organized campaign on Twitter, according to Albert Zhang, a researcher at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute’s International Cyber Policy Center.

Thousands of new or previously inactive accounts have helped the mascot go viral, he said — which China’s state media presented as evidence of the mascot’s popularity and, by extension, that of the Games.

“If you want to push out a lot of content on something like the Beijing Olympics, this is an easy way to do it,” Zhang said. He added that the campaign now underway was like others sponsored by the Chinese state to push Beijing’s narrative on topics such as COVID-19 and the crackdown on Uyghur Muslims in Xinjiang.

The information space inside China is not unlike the elaborate measures that have created the “closed loop” that keeps athletes, journalists and other participants strictly segregated from the general public.

Inside the “closed loop” of official propaganda, the state carefully curates almost anything ordinary Chinese people see or read. The effect has been an Olympics free of scandal or criticism or bad news.

When the United States men’s hockey team played an overmatched Chinese team, the game was not shown on the main state television sports channel, CCTV 5, and the 8-0 defeat was mentioned only glancingly in news reports. A state media slide show devoted to the men’s figure skating competition conspicuously omitted the gold medalist, Nathan Chen of the United States.

In Chinese footage of the Games, the mountains where many competitions are being held have been deftly framed to exclude the dry, brown slopes in the background, until Day 8 when a snowstorm covered them in a frosting of white.

One of the biggest political stories of these Games has also unfolded outside China’s internet firewall: the appearance of Peng Shuai, the professional tennis player and three-time Olympian who created a furor when she accused a senior Communist Party leader of sexually assaulting her.

The president of the International Olympic Committee, Thomas Bach, met her for dinner, as he promised he would when the global outcry over her fate threatened to overshadow the Games. Peng has appeared at curling and figure skating, among other events. None of that was shown inside China, where all references to her accusations have been erased.

“It’s absolutely critical to understand that this is not just another narrative,” Bandurski, of the China Media Project, said of the Olympics. “It’s a narrative that implies widespread censorship and the manipulation of public opinion, which is actually policy.”

Jack Stubbs, vice president of intelligence at Graphika, a social media monitoring company, said his firm had observed another Chinese propaganda network using foreign social media platforms, including Facebook. The network, which the company has dubbed Spamouflage, has spread videos emphasizing the Olympics as environmentally friendly and crooning about strengthening Chinese-Russian ties, punctuated by President Vladimir V. Putin’s attendance at the opening ceremony.

A video posted to Facebook by a fake account identified by the social media monitoring company Graphika criticized American media outlets’ reporting on the Ukraine conflict as “provoking China Russian relations.” (Facebook)

China has defended its use of Twitter and Facebook, platforms that it bans at home. A Foreign Ministry spokeswoman, Hua Chunying, said last year that such sites were an “extra channel” to combat negative portrayals in the West.

One American company, Vippi Media Inc., based in New Jersey, signed a $300,000 contract with the Consulate General of China in New York to help promote the Games, according to the company’s filing with the Justice Department under the Foreign Agents Registration Act.

New Jersey-based Vippi Media Inc. signed a $300,000 contract with China to help promote the Games. (Screenshot obtained from FARA eFile database by ProPublica)

Under the contract, first reported by the research group Open Secrets, the company has been promoting the Games by recruiting “social media stars” to post on Instagram, YouTube and TikTok, the company’s founder, Vipinder Jaswal, said in a telephone interview.

“They were very clear and I was very clear that it’s about the Olympics and the Olympics only, nothing to do with politics,” he said.

Once the Games began, the drama of the sports themselves dominated attention. Protests over China’s human rights record have not materialized, as some activists hoped. On the contrary, many athletes have heaped praise.

“When you really meet the people here and talk to them,” Jenise Spiteri, the American snowboarder competing for Malta, said in a state media interview, “everyone has a very good heart.”

Spicy Panda tweeted a state media report about another American competitor, the freestyle skier Aaron Blunck. In remarks posted by the official China Daily newspaper, Blunck praised China’s COVID-19 protocols.

“#AaronBlunck revealed the real China that is totally different from what some American media have said!” Spicy Panda’s post read.

Spicy Panda posted positive comments by American athletes about China’s administration of the Games. (Screenshot from Twitter by ProPublica)

Claire Fu and John Liu of The New York Times contributed reporting.

Jeopardy! champion Emma Saltzberg’s commitment to Israel-Palestine justice draws the ire of the organized American Jewish establishment.

Heather Zuck of Edwardsville, IL joined the Real Rock Army today

Source

Slips and falls due to the icy conditions all over the area. But the ice did not keep people away from the bars and restaurants that decided to stay open.

The man was walking in the westbound lane of Missouri Highway F in pursuit of his dog Wednesday night when he was struck, authorities said.

The Electoral Count Act is a 19th century relic that provides rules for how to count electoral votes in presidential elections. Unfortunately, it's so vague and poorly drafted that, in practice, it's close to worthless. The reason it's back in the news these days is obvious: after the debacle of 2020—and with a potentially worse ...continue reading "Here’s an idea for reforming the Electoral Count Act"

There's a new call from Illinois lawmakers to make buildings safer after a tornado killed six workers at an Amazon warehouse in Edwardsville on Dec. 10.

It's no secret government agencies love to screw with FOIA requesters. This is especially true when the responding agency doesn't care for the requester's attitude or thinks the release of information might lead to future negative reporting or embarrassment.

Most agencies, however, are careful not to set up any policies -- formal or informal -- that serve to deter certain requesters. And those that do have, so far, been lucky enough to not employ a whistleblower in their FOIA departments.

That's what happened to the Washington DC Metro Police Department, according to a recently filed lawsuit. Here's Elizabeth Nolan Brown with the details for Reason:

Did D.C. cops conspire to keep damning information from people and groups critical of them? That's what criminal defense lawyer Amy Phillips alleges in a new federal lawsuit, filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia.

The suit stems from a whistleblower's account of life inside the D.C. police department's Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) office. The whistleblower said she was instructed to flag for higher-ups any records requests coming from certain individuals and groups, as well as requests regarding certain sensitive topics. They would then strategize about ways to discourage, delay, or deny these requests.

Those targeted by this informal policy included reporters, activists, and members of local advisory groups. This is from former DC Metro PD FOIA officer Vendette T. Parker's sworn affidavit, which is attached to the defense lawyer's lawsuit [PDF]:

Some examples are Eric Flack, WUSA9 reporter; Marina Marraco, Fox5 reporter; the ACLU; Denise Krepp ANC [Advisory Neighborhood Commission] Commissioner; Lorenzo Greene, ANC Commissioner; Benjamin Douglass, Anti-Defamation League (ADL); Emily Barth, Public Defender's Office; and Amy Phillips, Public Defender's Office; among others.

This list was compiled by Parker and Metro PD Chief Operating Officer, LeeAnn Turner. As head of the FOIA office, Parker was expected to stonewall requests from requesters on the list as well as shield the department and its Chief of Police from embarrassment.

Although Ms. Turner did not name any specific individual in this meeting, she made it clear that I should bring to her attention any request coming from a person he has previously published a negative media article about Chief Newsham or MPD, if he uses the records for litigation if he is outspoken in City Council or community meetings in a negative way toward Chief Newsham or MPD, if the requester is the subject of a high profile incident, or if he repeatedly requests records that have the potential to be detrimental to Chief Newsham or MPD, regardless is of whether or not what is currently being requested is potentially detrimental.

The list of documents that might trigger this informal policy (no matter who requested them) were requests targeting the PD's controversial Gun Recovery Unit, personnel records, emails involving the police chief, use of force records, stop and frisk records, and anything involving "recent negative high profile events."

The list of requests and requesters was forwarded to Turner and the police chief and a weekly meeting was held to discuss how best to thwart requests that satisfied the unwritten criteria established by the PD's Chief Operating Officer.

Amy Philips first suspected something might be up after attending an Adverse Action Hearing for Officer Sean Lojocano, who was accused of conducting "unnecessarily invasive genital searches" of people he stopped. Despite this meeting being attended by other members of the public (including an ACLU rep and a local journalist), the Metro PD rejected Philips' request for recordings and transcripts of the hearing. And it did so in record time.

Less than ninety minutes after Phillips submitted her Lojocano request through the District’s online FOIA portal, she received a response denying her request in full. The response came from Latrina Crumlin, who identified herself as a “Staff Assistant, FOIA” for MPD. The response read “A release of such records would constitute as a [sic] clearly unwarranted invasion of personal privacy and is exempt from disclosure pursuant to D.C. Official Code § 2-534(a)(2) and (a)(3)(C).”  

This was wrong, and it was strange. Usually, MPD takes weeks or months to provide any substantive response to FOIA requests. And Crumlin’s position appeared to be that the records of a public hearing—one that Phillips and many others attended—were categorically excludable as invasions of someone’s privacy, which does not make any sense.

As Philips' lawsuit points out, a policy like this -- whether official or unofficial -- violates her First Amendment right to access this information. She's seeking an injunction forbidding the PD from engaging in future viewpoint and content based discrimination when handling FOIA requests.

While it's almost certain other public agencies are engaging in similar practices to thwart pesky requesters or delay public embarrassment for as long as possible, this is the first time a FOIA litigant has secured a sworn affidavit from someone who participated in FOIA keep away at the behest of their supervisors. That's going to go a long way in litigation like this and with any luck, the Metro PD won't be able to jerk people around in the future just because it doesn't like them or their requests.

Amendrezz Turner was charged with two counts of burglary and one count of aggravated battery after he tried to flee the scene of a Feb. 9 crash by stealing cars.

Bridges and overpasses are typically the first to freeze and the last to melt. That's because they're surrounded by cold and usually windy air during these winter weather events.

First responders were busy in Warren County Thursday.  The combination of rain changing over to sleet and snow resulted in several accidents.  Extreme cold is also expected to slow down road clearing efforts.

Dr. Katharine Caldwell says the transplant team refused to give up when their plane was grounded.

Area business leaders on Thursday lobbied St. Louis County lawmakers to approve funding for a $210 million expansion of the downtown convention center, saying that they’ll lose out if the project is further delayed.