The World Web Times - worldwebtimes.com

Гости Сергея Медведева- политики и психолог Леонид Гозман и правозащитница Ольга Романова

This morning Judge McAfee ruled that six of the Fulton County criminal charges against Donald Trump and other defendants weren’t worded specifically enough, and set them aside. This set off quite a round of doomsday hysteria on TV and Twitter.

But here are the facts: the main RICO part of the case (against Trump and others) remains intact. In spite of some misleading narratives, Trump’s phone call to Brad Raffensperger is remaining part of the case under the RICO charges. And while McAfee did set aside six charges, he stated that they can be refiled if they’re worded differently.

So what actually went wrong in the Fulton County case this morning? Nothing, really. All that noise you’re hearing on TV right now is just… noise. Of course the important ruling today will be whether Fani Willis is disqualified from the case. We’re still waiting on that. But given that the judge just allowed the key components of Willis’ case to stand, it doesn’t look like he’s planning to remove her. We’ll see. But so far there hasn’t been any bad news out of Fulton County today.

The post Fulton County criminal case against Donald Trump remains mostly intact after Judge McAfee ruling appeared first on Palmer Report.

After several years of rising crime, big city mayors and police chiefs across the country are breathing a sigh of relief. Statistics published by the Council of Criminal Justice and other recent analysis show the number of homicides and aggravated assaults fell by a respective 10% and 3% in big cities in 2023 compared to 2022, though the rates remain higher than in pre-pandemic years.

[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]

These are hopeful signals. If these trends persisted on a national scale, this could indicate violent crime markets have retracted. But declarations that violent crime is falling miss important—and disturbing—crime trends data that paint a much more complicated picture. While big city crime may be falling, suburban crime may be rising. More surprising still, crime in rural areas appears to be rising even faster—and a much higher share of this crime involves strangers and guns.

These startling findings come from an important but underappreciated nationally representative data source—the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS)—that includes crimes not reported to police. Along with last year’s big city estimates, the latest figures from the FBI’s 2022 UCR program gathered from police reports, and the Bureau of Justice Statistics’ NCVS report drawn from interviews with households, present a complex narrative that does more than merely highlight differences in data collection methods but unveils a nuanced and evolving picture of violent crime in the U.S.

Besides a slight rise in robbery rates from 65.5 to 66.1 per 100,000 residents, the UCR program suggests a national decrease in both the rates of fatal (homicide) and non-fatal felony violence (rape, robbery, and aggravated assault) from 2021 to 2022.  In contrast, the NCVS shows an increase in non-fatal felony violence, with victimizations per 1,000 persons over the age of 12 increasing from 5.6 in 2021 to 9.8 in 2022, primarily due to a doubling of aggravated assault rates. NCVS estimates imply that a substantial portion of crime remains unreported, the so-called “dark figure” of crime that eludes the detection of law enforcement.

A clearer picture of who is at greatest risk for violent victimization emerges when analyzing crime rates by location. The NCVS shows that the traditional boundaries between urban and non-urban violence are dissolving. Suburban and rural areas, once considered safe havens, are now confronting a jump in non-fatal violent crime, fundamentally changing the geography of public safety.

The robbery rate in urban centers increased by 21% over the three years, driven largely by the 78% increase between 2021 and 2022. Looking at the suburbs, the 2022 increase in robbery rates hit 21%, contributing to the 40% increase through 2021. In the rural areas where the American dream of pastoral peace is most cherished, robbery rates rose by 44% in 2022 after a two-year decline.

This shift is further accentuated in the rates of aggravated assault, which have not only risen in urban areas but have skyrocketed in non-urban areas. In urban centers, these assaults have risen by 51% in a single year from 2021 to 2022. Looking back at the suburbs and rural areas, the respective increases were even more pronounced with rates over nearly three times and two times higher in 2022 than in 2021.

Gun violence also increased and spread across geographies. The gun-related victimization rate in urban centers increased by 1.3 per 1,000 in 2022 compared to the previous year, reaching 2019 levels after a decrease. This rate doubled over the past two years in the suburbs and is slightly higher than in 2019, while in rural areas, there was a surge in non-fatal gun violence rates, with approximately 66,000 more reported victimizations between 2021 and 2022, returning to rates last observed in 1997.

Research suggests most violent crimes are committed by someone the victim knows such as friends, acquaintances, and relatives. This remains the case, but estimates indicate strangers are responsible for more violent crimes, especially in non-urban centers. After decreases in the number of violent felony victimizations involving strangers from 2019 to 2021, all areas experienced large increases by 2022. For this one-year period, these types of victimizations climbed by 37% in urban areas, 73% in the suburbs, and more than doubled (102%) in rural locales.

Read More: If We Want to Reduce Deaths at Hands of Police, We Need to Reduce Traffic Stops

Breaking down the data by race adds a layer of complexity to the narrative. White Americans have seen a marked increase in victimization, particularly in urban areas, reversing previous declines. From 2021 to 2022, violent felony victimization for this group rose by 75% in urban areas, 93% in suburban areas, and 62% in America’s countryside.

For Black Americans, the pattern is more complex, with an initial rise in urban victimization rates followed by a 20% decrease from 2021 to 2022. However, the increase in violent felonies in suburban areas paints a troubling picture of the changing risks these communities face. For Black Americans residing in the suburbs, the rate of violent felonies spiked 74% over the three years, with a sharp leap of 172% from 2021 to 2022. Outside the metropolitan centers, the three-year increase is less dramatic (29%) but still alarming.

The rise in violent crime comes at a time of historic domestic migration. During the height of the COVID-19 pandemic and associated lockdowns, people and families relocated from cities to the suburbs and rural locales, motivated by the flexibility of remote work and the desire for safer, more affordable, and more spacious living environments. Studies have found that violent victimization influences residential mobility, but it appears more factors are at play. As people migrate, they not only bring their dreams and aspirations but also create economic tensions and cultural integration challenges that can ferment crime and complicate public safety efforts. It’s in this intersection of mobility and security that we must revisit our approach to crime prevention and intervention.

Although the Justice Department’s Roadmap provides resources based on the Ten Essential Actions Cities Can Take to Reduce Violence Now, developed by the Council on Criminal Justice, the evidence is mostly from studies conducted in urban areas. Efforts to reduce violent crime in non-urban areas face challenges such as limited resources, large territories that inhibit community engagement and response times, despite initiatives like the BJA’s Rural and Small Department Violent Crime Reduction Program that collaborate with law enforcement agencies (LEAs) to develop strategies addressing these issues and Crime Analyst in Residence program intended to assist LEAs in enhancing their operational and procedural management through the utilization of data analysis and analytics.

This shift observed in the NCVS also calls for examination of the racial differences in victimization rates—particularly the heightened vulnerability of white Americans in urban settings and the complex pattern of rising and then decreasing rates for Black Americans.

Further research is needed to address gaps and uncertainties in the valuable insights provided by NCVS, particularly with regards to how victimization rates influence residential mobility within urban centers, the potential underestimation of victimization among Black people, and the variations within different areas. It is imperative to also examine the challenges posed by response rates to the NCVS, especially among hard-to-reach populations.

Meanwhile, NCVS estimates force us to seriously consider that criminal violence might be evolving rather than declining, necessitating the development and adoption of effective strategies like proven community violence reduction initiatives as well as housing, public health, and employment programs adapted to the particular needs and strengths of suburban and rural communities. Otherwise, there is a danger of resourcing and implementing urban-centric, pre-pandemic strategies in a post-pandemic world that misses the opportunity to improve community safety across racial and geographic divides.

While the recent data suggests a decrease in urban crime, many Americans still feel uneasy. It’s conceivable that the pronounced changes in victimization, particularly in suburban and rural areas, have heightened this sense of vulnerability. The discrepancy between the actual numbers and public perception challenges us to consider the changing geography of crime and the impact it has on the nation’s sense of security.

When Andy Morling heard about a revolutionary new weight-loss cure on the BBC last spring, he figured it might spark a shadier market for fakes. 

His hunch was right. Almost a year later, the law-enforcement veteran who spent the last four decades helping to bring down drug gangs and child sexual abusers is leading the charge against criminals looking to profit from the very human desire to slim down. 

Both organized crime and unscrupulous lone entrepreneurs are looking to capitalize on the weight-loss frenzy with concoctions that range from useless to potentially deadly. Their packaging mimics Novo Nordisk A/S’s Ozempic and Wegovy, the sister drugs that made the company the most valuable in Europe last year.

[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]

“This is a brand new criminal threat for us,” Morling said, speaking from an office outside London that sits adjacent to a secure warehouse filled with thousands of seized medicines, including large sacks of fake Ozempic. “It was born essentially last spring.”

Read More: Here’s What Americans Think of Weight Loss Drugs

That’s when the Novo medicines became a social media phenomenon, fueled by Hollywood celebrity endorsements, even as supply shortages kept them out of reach for many, especially outside the US. Wegovy, the weight-loss successor to the diabetes drug Ozempic, was first introduced in the U.K. last September, but its maker restricts how much can be shipped.

When there aren’t enough legitimate products to meet demand, Morling said, “criminals are very quick to find a way into it.” 

Morling doesn’t work for the police. He heads the criminal enforcement team at the U.K.’s Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency, or MHRA—a government agency better known for reviewing medicines than catching criminals.

Yet his team tracks down illegal websites and monitors social media to stamp out sales of fake “skinny jabs.” They even carry out raids. Their hands-on approach stands out in Europe, where some other agencies don’t actively seek out bogus treatments. 

The U.K. medicines agency has seized 869 fake Ozempic pens so far—more than its counterparts in Denmark, Ireland, Switzerland, Iceland, and the Netherlands combined. The pens found in Britain include crude fakes as well as ones distributed in bulk by more sophisticated criminals.

Some contained insulin—a potentially lethal filling—rather than semaglutide, the active ingredient in both Ozempic and Wegovy. While vital to people with diabetes, insulin can cause seizures and even death for the average person.

Read More: Wegovy Is Good for More Than Just Weight Loss

Patients have been hospitalized after taking suspected falsified Ozempic beyond the U.K., with reports from Austria, Lebanon, and the U.S. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration says it’s aware of five adverse events linked to the counterfeit drugs.

Wegovy and Ozempic have ignited something of a gold rush in the pharma industry, with drugmakers vying to capture a piece of the $100 billion market opportunity. While Novo was first, Eli Lilly & Co. has since introduced a similar injection and others are snapping at the drugmakers’ heels. 

Morling’s team initially started to hear from colleagues at the U.K. border about Ozempic pens being seized, he said. The products were fake—crudely disguised insulin pens with the label peeled off and replaced with an Ozempic sticker.

But the trade grew in sophistication, culminating in the seizure of 500 counterfeit pens at two U.K. wholesalers. To the uninitiated, some of them could be confused for the real deal, according to Morling. The fakes at the regulator’s warehouse include bar-codes and packaging that appear similar in color, size, and shape to legitimate pens.

To date, the U.K. border force has seized 369 fake Ozempic pens on the medicines agency’s behalf. The bigger tranche of counterfeits—500 in total—were found “knocking on the door of the regulated supply chain,” Morling said.

The products showing up in legal channels “concerns me greatly” because of the health risk, said Morling, who spent 37 years leading intelligence at government agencies including the Serious Fraud Office and the National Crime Agency.

Read More: Should We End Obesity?

Falsified drugs are big business for criminals globally, with pharmaceutical crime spiking by 50% between 2018 and 2022 and impacting the majority of countries, according to data from the Pharmaceutical Security Institute. The World Health Organization has estimated that one in ten medical products in low- and middle-income countries is substandard or falsified. 

With the advent of online pharmacies, it’s becoming harder for customers to distinguish between real medicines and imitations. 

“It only takes one or two rogue pharmacies to have a negative impact,” said Bernard Naughton, assistant professor of pharmacy at Trinity College Dublin. 

In Britain, whose supply chain Morling describes as one of the safest in the world, fake drugs have rarely been an issue for the medicines agency. 

So when the weight-loss imitations started to trickle in last year, his team sprung into action. The first task was to ensure that the border force had the latest intelligence.

There was no shortage of places to look. Notices had started to pop up on TikTok; Facebook forums were advising people which beauty salons to attend, and suspicious websites were promising stock. 

Multiple sites and Facebook pages still advertise “skinny jabs” for sale in the U.K. Several claim that their injections contain semaglutide. Some of the prices advertised are also well below the roughly £195 ($249) charged by high street pharmacies like Superdrug for a four-week course—and there’s no question of a prescription.

The MHRA’s criminal enforcement unit can take a page from the police’s playbook and go undercover to trace a product’s provenance, according to Morling.

“We will sometimes form relationships with the people behind these websites to try and understand who’s doing what to whom and we will conduct test purchases as well to trace things through bank accounts,” he said.

Read More: Why the Diabetes Drug Mounjaro Works So Well for Weight Loss

But the team can also take a softer approach, for example if a beauty salon is selling what they claim is semaglutide and advising on how to mix it with water.

“We don’t go in with the big stick to begin with,” Morling said. “I’ll reduce the threat in whatever way I can. If the most appropriate way of doing that it is to go and knock on the door and have a quiet word in somebody’s ear, then that’s what we’ll do.”

The MHRA is willing to prosecute those who put patients’ health at risk, said Alison Cave, the agency’s chief safety officer. That hasn’t happened yet in relation to Ozempic fakes.

For Danish drugmaker Novo, the proliferation of counterfeits is a “critical issue” that the company says it’s investigating with international and local health authorities.

The company is also taking action on its own, working with a third party to monitor illegal online sales of drugs purporting to be Ozempic or Wegovy. In some cases, Novo works with a private-investigations firm to try to identify a manufacturer and report it to the authorities.

While Morling and his team believe they have come down early and hard on fake products entering Britain, the weight-loss counterfeit market globally looks like it’s only just getting started. 

In December, South Africa’s drug regulator issued a warning about potentially fake Ozempic. That same month, the U.S. said it had seized thousands of units.

While the rest of Europe is also working to prevent fake Ozempic entering their supply chains, in many places, the approach is distinctly different from the U.K. drug regulator’s.

In Austria, criminal intelligence lead the investigations, with medicine agencies acting as support. Denmark, Austria, and Belgium’s drug regulators don’t monitor social media for potential counterfeits, although Belgium hopes to do so in the future when a new law comes into place. Denmark, Austria, and the Netherlands also said that they mainly rely on reports from external sources such as the police or citizens before carrying out investigations.

Ireland and Switzerland’s regulators have taken an approach more similar to that of the U.K., actively monitoring for fakes. Ireland has detained 286 units of products claiming to be semaglutide between 2022 and October 2023.

In the U.S., the FDA also takes an active role and is continuing to investigate counterfeit semaglutide in both the legitimate and illegitimate supply chains, a spokesperson said. The agency has also issued warning letters to stop the distribution of illegally marketed semaglutide.

In Britain at least, Morling believes the worst of the fake Ozempic surge is behind him. 

The situation was unique, he said, because there was “a supply challenge at the same time as huge social media and mainstream media interest, plus this brand new thing that had been licensed, all coming at the same time—it was the perfect storm.”

The apple never falls far from the tree, according to the proverb that gives Peacock’s new domestic thriller its title. But if the tree is Big Little Lies—both shows are based on best-selling mystery novels by Liane Moriarty—then Apples Never Fall, which will stream in full beginning March 14, has rolled quite a distance downhill from whence it dropped. Even Hulu’s silly adaptation of Moriarty’s Nine Perfect Strangers is substantially better.

[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]

Considering the personnel involved, it’s hard to tell why the show went so frustratingly wrong. Moriarty is on board as an executive producer. Showrunner Melanie Marnich worked on a pair of fascinating Brit Marling and Zal Batmanglij series, A Murder at the End of the World and The OA, after writing the very best episode of Big Love. Annette Bening (also an executive producer) and Sam Neill star as Joy and Stan Delaney, married tennis coaches who’ve recently sold their academy and retired. The eldest of their four adult children are played by the reliably great Jake Lacy and Alison Brie.

Yet the acting is inconsistent (even Neill’s hotheaded performance can verge on John McEnroe camp), and the directing workmanlike. All of which might have been forgivable if the script, from premise to characters to the execution of big plot twists, wasn’t such a disaster. The show is goofy from the very beginning. In the overwrought opening scene, Joy rides her apple-green bicycle through her hometown of West Palm Beach. She frowns, passing the Garces (formerly Delaney) Tennis Academy, and picks out a perfect red apple at an outdoor market. Katie Herzig’s slow, moody “Buried” (sample lyric: “All the secrets buried in the backyard”) plays on the soundtrack. Then, after an Apples Never Fall title card, the camera follows a trail of apples scattered across asphalt, zooming in on the abandoned bike with blood staining its gears.

I couldn’t help it; I laughed. Obviously, Joy’s disappearance isn’t so funny to her children, who soon realize that the annoying mom who never stops calling and texting them has become impossible to reach. In the absence of a believable explanation from Stan, they start investigating. Some of the Delaneys, who each get their own point-of-view episode, are broad caricatures. Stan has exactly one mood: angry. Like a watered-down version of the actor’s smug White Lotus villain, Lacy’s Troy works in venture capital and wears T-shirts that remind everyone he went to Stanford. Amy (Brie) is a central-casting unmoored hippie. Their younger siblings have circumstances rather than personalities. Brooke (Essie Randles) has a female fiancée and a physical therapy practice; Logan (Conor Merrigan Turner), says Joy, likes “boats and yoga.” For declining to continue the Delaney tennis dynasty, all four kids are disappointments to Stan.

Of course, once the search for Joy begins in earnest, everyone’s predictable secrets (infidelity, mostly) come out. And two key suspects emerge. There’s Stan, who has a nasty scratch on his face, has told some suspicious lies about his wife’s whereabouts, and, as the show never lets us forget, has quite a temper. More mysterious is Savannah (Georgia Flood), a young woman who appeared at the Delaneys’ doorstep months ago with a bloody forehead and a story about an abusive husband. Bored in retirement and desperate to mother someone as her own children ignored her, Joy took Savannah into her home over her husband’s objections. She’s long gone by the time Joy vanishes, but Logan urges the police to look into her, whoever she is, anyway.

It’s a serviceable premise for a potboiler, despite the thin characters and trope-laden plot. But subpar storytelling robs Apples Never Fall of all suspense—or, really, any other form of enjoyment. The dialogue leans on cliché: “I was like a father to you!” “She was a force.” “It’s crazy, isn’t it? How a split second can change everything for the rest of your life.” And Marnich treats viewers like we’re stupid, spoon-feeding unadorned exposition and analysis through a pair of generic detectives (Jeanine Serralles and Dylan Thuraisingham). “Did Stanley Delaney do what I think he just did?” one asks, in a typical exchange. “Yes, he did. He just threw his son under the bus,” the other replies. Often, characters’ motivations seem nonsensical. Other times, the show hints so relentlessly at why people do the things they do that you can see the twists coming several episodes away. I can’t imagine I’ll be the only one to guess the ending early on.

About that ending. It arrives with the same thuddingly obvious force as the hurricane that also hits West Palm late in the season. And it compounds the disservice that the show does to its mostly talented cast and viewers hungry for another delicious Liane Moriarty binge. Instead of saying something specific and true about women’s lives and families, the way Big Little Lies did, Apples Never Fall reduces Joy to the blandest, most unsurprising maternal stereotype. In a finale plainly engineered to make us weep, I felt nothing except irritation. Maybe it would’ve been different if Joy, or any other character, had come off as a real person in the first place.