Lawrence N. Brooks

Dear Commons Community,

Lawrence N. Brooks, the oldest World War II veteran in the U.S. — and believed to be the oldest man in the country — died on Wednesday at the age of 112.

His death was announced by the National WWII Museum and confirmed by his daughter.

Most African Americans serving in the segregated U.S. armed forces at the beginning of World War II were assigned to noncombat units and relegated to service duties, such as supply, maintenance and transportation, said Col. Pete Crean, vice president of education and access at the museum in New Orleans.  As reported by the Associated Press.

“The reason for that was outright racism — there’s no other way to characterize it,” Crean said.

But Brooks, born on Sept. 12, 1909, was known for his good-natured sense of humor, positivity and kindness. When asked for his secret to a long life, he often said, “serving God and being nice to people.”

“I don’t have no hard feelings toward nobody,” he said during a 2014 oral history interview with the museum. “I just want everything to be lovely, to come out right. I want people to have fun and enjoy themselves — be happy and not sad.”

On sunny days, Brooks was known for sitting on the front porch of the double shotgun house he shared with daughter Vanessa Brooks in the Central City neighborhood of New Orleans. Neighbors would call out to the local celebrity, wave and bring him soda and snacks.

Brooks was passionate about the New Orleans Saints football team and never missed a game, his daughter said. His church, St. Luke’s Episcopal, was also close to his heart and he never missed a Sunday service until the coronavirus pandemic hit.

Originally from Norwood, Louisiana, near Baton Rouge, Brooks’ family moved to the Mississippi Delta when he was an infant. He was one of 15 children, and lived too far from the nearest school, so his parents taught him what they could at home.

Brooks was working at a sawmill when he was drafted into the U.S. Army in 1940. After Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor, he was assigned to the mostly Black 91st Engineer General Service Regiment stationed in Australia.

Later in the war, troop losses virtually forced the military to begin placing more African American troops into combat positions. In 1941, fewer than 4,000 African Americans were serving in the military. By 1945, that number increased to more than 1.2 million.

The 91st, where Brooks served, was an Army unit that built bridges, roads and airstrips for planes. Brooks was assigned as a caretaker to three white officers. His job was to cook, drive and take care of their clothes.

President Joe Biden on Wednesday posted a video on Twitter of him calling Brooks to wish him a happy Veterans Day last year.

“He was truly the best of America,” Biden tweeted.

In the Veterans Day video, Biden thanked Brooks’ daughter Vanessa for taking such good care of him.

“What people don’t realize — you look at your dad and think of all of the African American men who fought — and some who died — in World War II and never got credit,” he said.

Brooks did not often speak publicly about the discrimination he and other Black soldiers faced in the war, or the discrimination his family faced in the Jim Crow Deep South, his daughter said.

Crean, who got to know Brooks and his family through his work at the museum, said Brooks did talk about noticing how much better he was treated as a Black man in Australia compared with the U.S. But Brooks told Crean thinking about it would make him angry, so he tried not to. During his oral history interview, Brooks said the officers he cared for treated him well and he considered himself fortunate not to have to fight in combat.

“I got lucky. I was saying to myself, ‘If I’m going to be shooting at somebody, somebody’s going to be shooting at me and he might get lucky and hit,’” he said.

He often told the story about a time when he was a passenger in a C-47 aircraft delivering a load of barbed wire to the front when one of the transport plane’s engines went out.

After they dumped the cargo to conserve weight, he made his way to the cockpit. He told the pilot and co-pilot that since they were the only two with parachutes, if they had to jump for it, he was going to grab on to one of them.

“We made it, though,” he said during the 2014 oral history interview, laughing. “We had a big laugh about that.”

Despite not being in combat, Brooks did experience enemy fire during the war. He said the Japanese would sometimes bomb Owen Island, where he worked. He said he learned to tell the difference between the sounds of Japanese, American and German planes approaching.

“We’d be running like crazy, trying to hide,” he said. They had to dig foxholes to protect themselves.

He was discharged from the Army in August 1945 as a private first class.

When he returned from service, he worked as a forklift driver until retiring in his 60s. He has five children, five stepchildren, and dozens of grandchildren and great-grandchildren. He lost his wife, Leona, shortly after Hurricane Katrina.

That 2005 disaster destroyed his home. Then in his late 90s, he was evacuated from his home’s roof via helicopter. His daughter described him as “resilient.”

“He’s been through a lot. He’s real tough, and that’s one thing I learned from him. If nothing else, he instilled in me, ‘Do your best and whatever you can’t do, it don’t make no sense to worry about it,’” she told the AP. “I think that’s why he has lived as long as he has.”

Starting with his 105th birthday, the museum began throwing him annual birthday parties. His favorite part of the celebration was watching the Victory Belles, a trio performing the music of the 1940s. During the coronavirus pandemic in 2020 and 2021, the museum organized a parade in front of his home with brass bands and Krewe of Zulu warriors in full regalia.

“Even at 112, Mr. Brooks stood up for a little bit and danced,” Crean said.

Mr. Brooks was an honored member of America’s greatest generation!

May he rest in peace!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

On December 7, 1941, 353 Japanese fighter planes attacked the American naval base at Pearl Harbor near Honolulu, Hawaii. The barrage lasted two hours during which 2,403 Americans were killed and 1,178 others were wounded. The day after the assault, President Franklin D. Roosevelt asked Congress to declare war on Japan in what has become known as his “Day of Infamy ” speech.

On January 6, 2021, a violent mob of supporters of President Donald Trump stormed the U.S. Capitol in an attack that left multiple people dead and more than 140 officers injured.  Our elected representatives had to hide and run in fear of their lives.  This, America’s Second Day of Infamy, was not perpetrated by a foreign enemy but by Donald Trump and his enablers in the Republican Party, at Fox News, and right-wing terrorist organizations. This “Second Day of Infamy” will live on as the most direct assault on American democracy.  For shame to all those involved.  May they answer for their transgressions.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Annoyed by the lack of TV coverage it would receive, former President Donald Trump canceled his press conference tomorrow marking the anniversary of the January 6th attack at the U.S. Capitol.

Trump said he would deliver his remarks instead at a rally next week in Florence, Arizona.

In a statement from his post-presidency PAC, Trump — who instigated the Jan. 6, 2021, riot following a rally near the White House because he had lost the election — bizarrely blamed the House select committee charged with investigating the Capitol riot for his last-minute cancellation.

“In light of the total bias and dishonesty of the January 6th Unselect Committee of Democrats, two failed Republicans, and the Fake News Media, I am canceling the January 6th Press Conference at Mar-a-Lago on Thursday, and instead will discuss many of those important topics at my rally on Saturday, January 15th, in Arizona —It will be a big crowd!” Trump said in a statement Tuesday night.

Trump is a coward in everything he does.  In this case, he is afraid that his conference would be ignored by the news media and his pathetic image would be tarnished.

Tony

Richard Leakey

Dear Commons Community,

Richard Leakey, the Kenyan paleoanthropologist and fossil hunter whose discoveries of ancient human skulls and skeletons helped cement Africa’s place as the cradle of humanity, died on Sunday in Kenya. He was 77.

In a statement, President Uhuru Kenyatta of Kenya announced his death. Mr. Leakey died at his home outside Nairobi, said Prof. Lawrence Martin, director of the Turkana Basin Institute at Stony Brook University on Long Island; Mr. Leakey was its founder.

Mr. Leakey’s parents, Louis and Mary Leakey, were towering figures in paleontology, but Richard was initially determined to steer clear of his parents’ field, finding work instead as a safari guide, before eventually, and perhaps inevitably, succumbing to fossil fever.

A turning point came on a flight in 1967, when he looked down over the rocky shores of Lake Turkana in Kenya and had, by his account, a feeling that the area could yield a trove of fossils. He was right.

The fossils found there by Mr. Leakey and his “Hominid Gang,” as he and his colleagues came to be known, would change the world’s understanding of human evolution.

One of his most celebrated finds came in 1984 when he helped unearth “Turkana Boy,” a 1.6-million-year-old skeleton of a young male Homo erectus. The other was a skull called “1470,” found in 1972, that extended the world’s knowledge of the Homo erectus species several million years deeper into the past.

“He was a mentor to dozens of Africans in diverse fields and had played a key role in shaping the world’s view on Africa’s place in the human evolution story,” WildlifeDirect, the organization he founded, said in a statement on Sunday.

But Mr. Leakey was important for more than finding fossils, said Prof. John Hawks, a paleoanthropologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison; he was also credited with “creating an entire scientific, interdisciplinary infrastructure that enabled discoveries” and established a new model for scientific research, Professor Hawks said.

Mr. Leakey’s discoveries landed him on the cover of Time magazine in 1977. He starred in a 1981 BBC program, “The Making of Mankind,” which was also the title of one of his many books.

He parlayed his fossil hunter fame into a public-minded career. Among his roles were Kenya’s head of public service, the director of the National Museums of Kenya and the chairman of the board of the Kenya Wildlife Service, Mr. Kenyatta said in his statement.

“He had equally impactful careers in so many different areas,” Professor Martin said, adding that Mr. Leakey “has probably been responsible for producing close to half of the world’s evidence for human evolution.”

Mr. Leakey was a passionate conservationist with a fiery personality. In 1989, he drew international attention when he took a stand against the illegal ivory trade by helping to burn the country’s stockpile of 12 tons of ivory, confiscated from smugglers and poachers. The act was repeated in 2016.

His fossil discoveries were almost as remarkable as his ability to evade death. He fractured his skull as a boy, almost died after receiving a kidney transplant from his brother Philip in 1979, lost both legs in a 1993 plane crash and was once treated for skin cancer.

Richard Erskine Frere Leakey was born in Nairobi on Dec. 19, 1944, the second of Louis and Mary’s three sons. “I would never describe it as a close family,” he once said. Anthropology always took precedence over a conventional family life, he recalled.

Though early on he was determined not to be an anthropologist, the field found him anyway. Heir to what has been called Leakey’s Luck, he found fossil after fossil as a child, including the jaw of an extinct pig, he said in an interview with Stony Brook University.

“I was angry to this day that they took the bone away from me because it was too important for a 4-year-old to be digging up,” he said.

After he decided to pursue fossil hunting, he sought a degree in anthropology in London but ran out of money before starting classes. He returned to Kenya to pursue the field firsthand, having already gained more experience in the field while growing up than many graduate anthropologists.

As a famous fossil hunter Mr. Leakey eventually returned to academia as a sought-after lecturer. He had never been to a university, he liked to say, except to lecture.

His marriage to Margaret Cropper ended in divorce. He is survived by his wife, Meave Leakey, herself a renowned paleoanthropologist; their daughters, Louise and Samira; a daughter, Anna, from his previous marriage; and three grandchildren.

Mr. Leakey believed strongly in a message his father had written long ago, that the past was the “key to our future.” For him, paleoanthropology and conservation were “deeply entwined,” said Paige Madison, a paleoanthropology historian based in Copenhagen.

Toward the end of his life, Mr. Leakey dreamed of building a museum of humankind, to be called Ngaren. It would be situated in the Rift Valley of Kenya, the site of one of his most famous discoveries, the Turkana Boy.

“Ngaren is not just another museum, but a call to action,” Mr. Leakey said in a 2019 statement announcing its opening, scheduled for 2024. “As we peer back through the fossil record, through layer upon layer of long extinct species, many of which thrived far longer than the human species is ever likely to do, we are reminded of our mortality as a species.”

I read his book, Origins, in the late 1970s.  I always thought it was one of the most important books I ever read.  It still sits on a bookshelf in my home library.

May he rest in peace!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

The Associated Press has an article this morning examining what students are learning about the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol on January 6^th.  Its conclusion is that it may depend on where they live.  Here is the entire article.

“In a Boston suburb in heavily Democratic Massachusetts, history teacher Justin Voldman said his students will spend the day journaling about what happened and talking about the fragility of democracy.

“I feel really strongly that this needs to be talked about,” said Voldman, who teaches history at Natick High School, 15 miles (24 kilometers) west of Boston. As the grandson of a Holocaust survivor, he said “it is fair to draw parallels between what happened on Jan. 6 and the rise of fascism.”

Voldman said he feels fortunate: “There are other parts of the country where … I would be scared to be a teacher.”

Liz Wagner, an eighth and ninth grade social studies teacher in a Des Moines suburb of increasingly Republican Iowa, got an email from an administrator last year, warning teachers to be careful in how they framed the discussion.

“I guess I was so, I don’t know if naïve is the appropriate word, perhaps exhausted from the pandemic teaching year last year, to understand how controversial this was going to be,” she said.

Some students questioned Wagner last year when she referred to what happened as an insurrection. She responded by having them read the dictionary definition for the word. This year, she will probably show students videos of the protest and ask them to write about what the footage shows.

“This is kind of what I have to do to ensure that I’m not upsetting anybody,” Wagner said. “Last year I was on the front line of the COVID war, trying to dodge COVID and now I’m on the front line of the culture war, and I don’t want to be there.”

With shouting crowds at school board meetings and political action committees investing millions in races to elect conservative candidates across the country, talking to students about what happened on Jan. 6 is increasingly fraught.

Teachers now are left to decide how — or whether — to instruct their students about the events that sit at the heart of the country’s division. And the lessons sometimes vary based on whether they are in a red state or a blue state.

Facing History and Ourselves, a nonprofit that helps teachers with difficult lessons on subjects like the Holocaust, offered tips on how to broach the topic with students in the hours after the riot.

Within 18 hours of publication, it had 100,000 page views — a level of interest that Abby Weiss, who oversees the development of the nonprofit’s teaching tools, said was unlike anything the group has seen before.

In the year that has followed, Weiss said, Republican lawmakers and governors in many states have championed legislation to limit the teaching of material that explores how race and racism influence American politics, culture and law.

“Teachers are anxious,” she said. “On the face of it, if you read the laws, they’re quite vague and, you know, hard to know actually what’s permissible and what isn’t.”

Racial discussions are hard to avoid when discussing the riot because white supremacists were among those descending on the halls of power, said Jinnie Spiegler, director of curriculum and training for the Anti-Defamation League. She said the group is concerned that the insurrection could be used as a recruitment tool and wrote a newly released guide to help teachers and parents combat those radicalization efforts.

“To talk about white supremacy, to talk about white supremacist extremists, to talk about their racist Confederate flag, it’s fraught for so many reasons,” Spiegler said.

Anton Schulzki, the president of the National Council for the Social Studies, said students are often the ones bringing up the racial issues. Last year, he was just moments into discussing what happened when one of his honors students at William J. Palmer High School in Colorado Springs said, “’You know, if those rioters were all Black, they’d all be arrested by now.”

Since then, three conservative school board candidates won seats on the school board where Schulzki teaches, and the district dissolved its equity leadership team. He is covered by a contract that offers academic freedom protections, and has discussed the riot periodically over the past year.

“I do feel,” he said, “that there may be some teachers who are going to feel the best thing for me to do is to ignore this because I don’t want to put myself in jeopardy because I have my own bills to pay, my own house, to take care of, my own kids to take back and forth to school.”

Concerned teachers have been reaching out to the American Federation of Teachers, which last month sued over New Hampshire’s new limits on the discussion of systemic racism and other topics.

“What I’m hearing now over and over and over again is that these laws that have been passed in different places are really intended to chill the discussion of current events,” said Randi Weingarten, the union’s president and a former social studies teacher. “I am very concerned about what it means in terms of the teaching as we get closer and closer to January 6th.”

The biggest fear for Paula Davis, a middle school special education teacher in a rural central Indiana district, is that the discussion about what happened could be used by teachers with a political agenda to indoctrinate students. She won’t discuss Jan. 6 in her classroom; her focus is math and English.

“I think it’s extremely important that any teacher that is addressing that topic does so from an unbiased perspective,” said Davis, a regional chapter chair for Moms for Liberty, a group whose members have protested mask and vaccine mandates and critical race theory. “If it cannot be done without bias, then it should not be done.”

But there is no way Dylan Huisken will avoid the topic in his middle school classroom in the Missoula, Montana, area town of Bonner. He plans to use the anniversary to teach his students to use their voice constructively by doing things like writing to lawmakers.

“Not addressing the attack,” Huisken said, “is to suggest that the civic ideals we teach exist in a vacuum and don’t have any real-world application, that civic knowledge is mere trivia.”

IT WAS AN INSURRECTION AND SHOULD BE TAUGHT AS SUCH!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

USA Today compiled a list of ten key events that will shape the 2022 elections.  It will be a a particularly busy political year – and possibly a volatile one.

Political campaigns in 2022 will determine control of Congress and a number of big-state governors’ offices, the political strength of President Joe Biden and the continuing influence of ex-President Donald Trump, as well as voting rights, LGBTQ rights, and abortion rights.  

Nationally, Republicans are favored to recapture control of the U.S. House, in part because the president’s party tends to do poorly in midterm elections. This year, that’s the Democrats, who are also disadvantaged by new post-Census congressional redistricting plans that in several states favor the Republicans.

“Historically, in a president’s first midterm election, his party is going to be losing seats,” said Jessica Taylor, the Senate editor for the Cook Political Report.

Democrats have a better chance of keeping control of the U.S. Senate, analysts said, because some Trump-backed Republican candidates may have trouble winning statewide races, even with the bad overall political climate for Democrats.

“To me,” Taylor said, “it comes down to climate vs. candidates.”

The nation’s political battles will play out all year, with some landmark events already discernible. Here are ten potential turning points as described by USA Today!

The insurrection anniversary (Jan. 6)

One year after Trump supporters invaded the U.S, Capitol, seeking to stop the counting of the electoral votes that elected Biden to the presidency, some Democrats are expected to argue that the violence was only a preview of things to come.

Among their concerns: Trump supporters are seeking to install like-minded Republicans in legislatures and state election offices across the country, potentially making it easier to overturn elections in the future.

Trump, meanwhile, says he will hold a “news conference” on Jan. 6 to again make false claims of “voter fraud” – a theme he wants Republicans to echo throughout the 2022 election year.

Biden’s State of the Union (late January or early February)

The president’s annual address to a joint session of Congress gives Biden an unfiltered opportunity to make the Democratic case to millions of Americans (and voters).

Biden and the Democrats could use all the help they can get. Biden’s approval ratings average little more than 40%, and, as often noted, a new president’s party does poorly in the midterm elections.

The Conservative Political Action Conference (Feb. 24-27)

The nation’s most conservative political candidates and activists gather in Orlando for a conference designed in part to hone election strategies.

One potential speaker: Trump, who addressed two CPAC conferences in 2021.

It was at this Orlando event in 2021 that Trump vowed to defeat Republicans who supported his impeachment over the Jan. 6 insurrection or otherwise opposed his efforts to overturn Biden’s election. That theme will run throughout campaign 2022.

Texas primary (March 1)

As it stands, Texas will host the year’s first set of party primaries, contests that will say much about Republican unity and Trump’s influence.

Gov. Greg Abbott, despite his push for new restrictions on abortion and voting rights, faces a gaggle of conservative challengers, making him potentially vulnerable to a May 24 runoff.

The value of a Trump endorsement is also on the Lone Star State ballot. Incumbent Attorney General Ken Paxton has Trump’s support but is being challenged by George P. Bush, the nephew and grandson of former Republican presidents, and prominent conservative congressman Louie Gohmert.

(The new Texas redistricting plan is the subject of lawsuits, and courts could delay the primary. This has already happened in North Carolina, and could also happen in states like Pennsylvania.)

Another big primary day: Pennsylvania and North Carolina (scheduled May 17)

Two more battleground states that could wind up deciding control of the U.S. Senate have primaries on the same day.

Both states have open and competitive Senate races for seats being vacated by Republicans, Pat Toomey in Pennsylvania and Richard Burr in North Carolina.

Both parties have crowded Senate primaries in Pennsylvania and North Carolina, with the survivors moving on to a pair of the most closely watched contests of the fall.

Georgia primary (May 24)

Georgia came out of the 2020 election season as probably the most influential political state in the nation.

It was in Georgia that Democrats won two Senate runoffs on Jan. 5. giving the party control of a 50-50 Senate because of Vice President Kamala Harris’s authority to break ties.

One of those new senators, Raphael Warnock, is seeking a full six-year term, and his Republican opponent could be retired football star (and Trump endorsee) Herschel Walker.

It was also in Georgia that Trump was caught trying to pressure Republican state officials into “finding” him enough votes to prevail over Biden in the state. The officials’ resistance triggered Trump’s involvement in the 2022 elections.

Now Trump is supporting Republican challenger David Perdue, a former U.S. senator, against incumbent GOP Gov. Brian Kemp. Trump says Kemp and other GOP officials did not do enough to help him overturn the Georgia election.

The winner of a brutal and divisive Republican gubernatorial primary will have to run against former state legislator and voting rights advocate Stacey Abrams, whose voter registration drives of recent years have made Democrats competitive in this Deep South state.

The Supreme Court’s abortion decision (late June)

The Supreme Court usually wraps up its terms by issuing a series of major rulings in June – and this year that batch of big cases includes what figures to be a landmark ruling on abortion, making it a major issue in elections for years.

All sides are preparing for a Supreme Court decision striking down the 1973 Roe vs. Wade abortion rights ruling, clearing the way for states to further restrict or even ban the procedure.

Democrats, citing polls that show support for abortion rights, believe that a world without Roe will favor their candidates. Republicans note that abortion opponents have fueled the conservative movement for decades, and they will be energized by the prospect of more state restrictions.

Face-off in Wyoming (Aug. 16)

A Republican primary in one of the nation’s smallest states may provide the biggest test of Trump’s influence.

Trump’s highest-profile Republican target is Rep. Liz Cheney, R-Wyo., the highest-ranking Republican who voted to impeach Trump. Other House Republicans eventually voted to demote Cheney from her leadership job because of her continuing criticism of the ex-president.

Now Cheney is being challenged by local attorney Harriet Hageman, a former ally who now has Trump’s backing.

Early voting (September and October) 

At least 43 states offer some form of early voting, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. It reports that “early voting periods range in length from three days to 46 days,” and “the average number of early in-person voting days is 23.”

Given Trump’s ongoing complaints about the 2020 election, voting will be heavily monitored by both parties. Disputes can be expected.

Election Day (Nov. 8)

With the rise of mail-in voting and the prospect of close races, it could take days for some elections to be decided. There could also be myriad protests.

While these and other events are predictable, political professionals also say that many races could be decided by unexpected events: a new COVID variant, a political scandal, some kind of foreign policy crisis or developments in the overall economy.

Charlotte Clymer, an LGBTQ political activist who said proposed laws attacking those communities will also fuel voter turnout in 2022, said many results will be decided by things we don’t yet know about.

“Every week in an election cycle is a lifetime,” she said. “You never know what’s going to happen.”

We will wait and see how all of the above evolve! It will be an interesting year!

Tony

Elizabeth Holmes

Dear Commons Community,

Elizabeth Holmes, the founder of the failed blood testing start-up Theranos, was found guilty of four of 11 charges of fraud yesterday, in a case that came to symbolize the pitfalls of Silicon Valley’s culture of hustle, hype and greed.

Ms. Holmes, who had once promised to revolutionize health care, was the most prominent executive to field fraud accusations in a generation of high-flying, money-losing start-ups. A jury of eight men and four women took 50 hours over seven days of deliberations to reach a verdict, convicting her of three counts of wire fraud and one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud by lying to investors to raise money for her company.

Ms. Holmes was found not guilty on four other counts related to defrauding patients who had used Theranos’s blood tests. The jury was unable to reach a verdict on three counts of deceiving investors, for which Judge Edward J. Davila of California’s Northern District said he planned to declare a mistrial.

Each count carries a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison, terms that are likely to be served concurrently. Ms. Holmes, 37, is expected to appeal. A sentencing date is expected to be set at a hearing on the three hung charges next week.  As reported by The New York Times.

“While the verdict was read, Ms. Holmes — who had falsely claimed that Theranos’s blood tests could detect a variety of ailments with just a few drops of blood — sat motionless. Then she gathered her belongings and whispered to her lawyer. She went down the row of family and friends in the court gallery behind her, hugging each one before leaving through a side door.

“It’s been a long case,” Judge Davila told the jury. “We collectively have been through many things.”

Stephanie Hinds, a U.S. attorney, said in a statement that the guilty verdicts reflected Ms. Holmes’s “culpability in this large-scale investor fraud.”

The verdict stands out for its rarity. Few technology executives are charged with fraud and even fewer are convicted. If sentenced to prison, Ms. Holmes would be the most notable female executive to serve time since Martha Stewart did in 2004 after lying to investigators about a stock sale. And Theranos, which dissolved in 2018, is likely to stand as a warning to other Silicon Valley start-ups that stretch the truth to score funding and business deals.

The mixed verdict suggested that jurors believed the evidence presented by prosecutors that showed Ms. Holmes lied to investors about Theranos’s technology in the pursuit of money and fame. They were not swayed by her defense of blaming others for Theranos’s problems and accusing her co-conspirator, Ramesh Balwani, the company’s chief operating officer and her former boyfriend, of abusing her. They were also not swayed by the prosecutor’s case that she had defrauded patients.

On Monday, jurors told the court that they were deadlocked on three of the charges of defrauding investors. Judge Davila pushed them to continue deliberating, but they were unable to agree.

The verdict arrived in a frenzied period for the tech industry, with investors fighting to get into hot deals and often ignoring potential red flags about the companies they were putting money into. Some have warned that more Theranos-like disasters loom.

In recent years, tales of start-up chicanery, from the bungled initial public offering of WeWork to the aggressive boundary-pushing tactics of Uber, have not slowed the flow of money toward charismatic founders spinning tales of business success. Those downfalls captured the public’s attention, but did not result in criminal charges.

Yet the Justice Department under President Biden has renewed its focus on white-collar crimes. “We will urge prosecutors to be bold,” Lisa O. Monaco, the deputy attorney general, recently said in a speech. “The fear of losing should not deter them.”

Ms. Holmes’s conviction sends a message to other founders and executives to be careful about their statements to investors and the public, said Jessica Roth, a law professor at Cardozo School of Law and former federal prosecutor in the Southern District of New York.

It “shines a light on the importance of drawing a distinction between truth and optimistic projections — and keeping that clear in one’s mind,” she said.

Ms. Holmes rose to prominence by mimicking the disruptive change-the-world chutzpah of Silicon Valley heroes like Steve Jobs — a playbook that has turned companies like Apple, Tesla, Google and Facebook into some of the most valuable in the world.

In the process, she captured the attention of heads of state, top business leaders and wealthy families with idealistic plans to revolutionize the health care industry. She traveled the world on private jets, was feted with awards and glowing magazine cover stories and lauded as the world’s youngest self-made female billionaire.

But she crossed into fraud when she lied about the accuracy, types and number of tests Theranos’s machines could do to raise funding and secure business deals.

“That’s a crime on Main Street and it’s a crime in Silicon Valley,” Robert Leach, an assistant U.S. attorney, said in opening statements at the trial’s start.

The verdict concludes nearly four months of proceedings that alternated between exhilarating and plodding. There were delays because of a coronavirus scare, a burst water pipeline, technology problems in the courtroom and juror travel. One juror was dismissed for playing Sudoku and another for her Buddhist faith. Crowds of spectators, many of whom followed the Theranos saga via podcasts, documentaries, books and news articles, waited for hours for a spot in the courtroom’s limited seats.

Inside, jurors heard from dozens of witnesses and viewed hundreds of pieces of evidence used in support of prosecutors’ argument that Ms. Holmes knowingly misled investors and patients on her rise to fame and fortune.

Witnesses included James Mattis, the former defense secretary who sat on Theranos’s board, as well as Lisa Peterson, who managed money for the wealthy family of a former education secretary, Betsy DeVos, and invested $100 million in Theranos. Prominent investors including Rupert Murdoch and Larry Ellison, as well as two former secretaries of state, George Shultz and Henry Kissinger, who sat on its board, were discussed but never called to the stand.

The case’s evidence outlined Ms. Holmes’s role in faked demonstrations, falsified validation reports, misleading claims about contracts, and overstated financials at Theranos. Jurors heard recordings and watched videos of Ms. Holmes making inflated or misleading claims about Theranos.

Before it shut down in 2018, Theranos voided two years’ worth of its blood tests. It paid to settle several investor lawsuits, as well as fraud charges by the Securities and Exchange Commission.

But prosecutors argued that Ms. Holmes’s actions went beyond those punishments — they were criminal. She led investors to lose hundreds of millions of dollars and patients to get unreliable test results, they said.

“At so many of the forks in the road, she chose the dishonest path,” John Bostic, an assistant U.S. attorney, said in closing arguments.

In her defense, Ms. Holmes’s lawyers tried to discredit testimony from whistle-blowers, attacked investors for not doing more research into Theranos and said Ms. Holmes’s failures were not a crime.

Ms. Holmes capped the proceedings by taking the stand. Over seven days of testimony, she alternated between accepting responsibility for certain missteps and deflecting blame for other problems to colleagues.

She said she believed that Theranos’s tests worked and had relied on the expertise of more qualified people running the company’s lab. And she used her charisma to sell jurors on the same vision of the future that, years earlier, had helped her win over investors, world leaders and the press.

“I wanted to talk about what this company could do a year from now, five years from now, 10 years from now,” Ms. Holmes said. “I wanted to talk about what was possible.”

Ms. Holmes’s argument that her optimistic projections were no different than that of other Silicon Valley companies contradicted the government’s evidence, which was consistent with traditional fraud cases, Ms. Roth said.

“If other founders and executives are engaged in the kinds of deceit that was alleged and proven by considerable evidence in this case, then they should be concerned,” she said.

Justice was served in this case and the verdict is a signal to those who commit white-collar crimes that defraud others.

Tony

Marjorie Taylor Greene

Dear Commons Community,

Yesterday, Twitter permanently suspended the personal account of Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, Republican-Georgia, after the company said she had violated its Covid-19 misinformation policies. As reported by The New York Times.

Twitter suspended Ms. Greene’s account after she tweeted on Saturday, falsely, about “extremely high amounts of Covid vaccine deaths.” She included a misleading chart that pulled information from a government database of unverified raw data called the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System, or VAERS, a decades-old system that relies on self-reported cases from patients and health care providers.

Twitter said that Ms. Greene had a fifth “strike,” which meant that her account will not be restored. The company had issued her a fourth strike in August after she falsely posted that the vaccines were “failing.” Ms. Greene was given a third strike less than a month before that when she had tweeted that Covid-19 was not dangerous and that vaccines should not be mandated.

Ms. Greene’s official Congressional account, @RepMTG, remains active because tweets from that account did not violate the service’s rules.

“We’ve been clear that, per our strike system for this policy, we will permanently suspend accounts for repeated violations of the policy,” Katie Rosborough, a Twitter spokeswoman, said in a statement. The company allows accounts to submit an appeal and will potentially reverse the suspension if the violating post is proven to be factual.

On the alternative social messaging platform Telegram, Ms. Greene said that Twitter “is an enemy to America and can’t handle the truth.”

Her suspension comes as coronavirus cases have surged again in the United States from the highly infectious Omicron variant. New York State recorded over 85,000 new coronavirus cases on the last day of 2021, the highest one-day total in the state since the pandemic began, officials announced on Saturday.

Twitter has long banned users from sharing misinformation that could lead to harm. In rare cases, the company has permanently banned high-profile accounts, including the account of former President Donald J. Trump, over a risk of “further incitement of violence” after a mob of Trump loyalists stormed the U.S. Capitol last Jan. 6.

There is currently no evidence of widespread major side effects from the coronavirus vaccines. Last month, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said Johnson & Johnson’s vaccine could trigger a rare blood clotting disorder now linked to dozens of cases and at least nine deaths in the United States in the past year. The agency recommended using other approved vaccines instead.

The VAERS database, which is managed by the Food and Drug Administration and the C.D.C., has been cited in many coronavirus falsehoods to push the idea that side effects from the Covid-19 vaccines have been underreported.

A spokeswoman for the F.D.A. declined to comment, but pointed to an overview of the VAERS database on the F.D.A.’s website that said VAERS reports “generally cannot be used to determine if a vaccine caused or contributed to an adverse event or illness.”

In March, Twitter introduced a policy that explained the penalties for sharing lies about the virus and vaccines. People who violate that policy are subject to escalating punishments known as strikes and could face a permanent ban if they repeatedly share misinformation about the virus.

It was Ms. Greene’s false proclamations about the coronavirus, including opposing vaccines and masks as tools to curb the pandemic, that got her suspended from Twitter. In July, Ms. Greene argued that Covid-19 was not dangerous for people unless they were obese or over age 65, and said vaccines should not be required.

In August, Ms. Greene said on Twitter, “The F.D.A. should not approve the covid vaccines.” She said that there were too many reports of infection and the spread of the coronavirus among vaccinated people, and that the vaccines were “failing” and “do not reduce the spread of the virus & neither do masks.”

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s current guidance states, “Covid-19 vaccines are effective against severe disease and death.”

Imran Ahmed, the chief executive of the Center for Countering Digital Hate, which published research on the dozen most prominent social media influencers spreading misinformation about vaccines, said it suited Ms. Greene to portray her suspension as part of a pattern of moves by Twitter to censor conservatives.

“In fact, it is for the banal reason that she’s a super spreader of lies” that Ms. Greene was suspended, Mr. Ahmed said.

Anything that reduces the public lies and visibility of Taylor Greene is a step in the right direction!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

The Chronicle of Philanthropy‘s annual top 10 list of the largest gifts announced by individuals or their foundations totaled more than $18.1 billion in 2021. (The 2021 list actually includes 11 donations because of ties.) The contributions on the 2021 list went primarily to well-established institutions. Eight of the 11 gifts are from billionaires whose cumulative wealth totals $426.3 billion.

The Chronicle’s annual rankings are based on the 10 biggest publicly announced gifts. The tally does not include contributions of artwork or gifts from anonymous donors. In February, the Chronicle will unveil its annual ranking of the 50 biggest donors, a list based on individuals’ total contributions in 2021 rather than single gifts.

___

The Chronicle of Philanthropy‘s Top 10 List of Biggest Gifts

1. Bill Gates, co-founder of Microsoft, and Melinda French Gates, founder of Pivotal Ventures, an investment firm, gave $15 billion to Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation for endowment
2. (tie) Philip Knight, co-founder of Nike, and his wife, Penny gave $500 million to University of Oregon to expand the Phil and Penny Knight Campus for Accelerating Scientific Impact
3. (tie) George Soros, chairman of Soros Fund Management, through his Open Society Foundations gave $500 million to Bard College for endowment
4. Patrick Ryan, founder of Ryan Specialty Group, an insurance services company, and his wife, Shirley gave $480 million to Northwestern University for a variety of programs
5. Denny Sanford, chairman of United National Corporation Sanford Health, gave $350 million to establish a virtual-care hospital
6. Denny Sanford, chairman of United National Corporation Sanford Health, gave $300 million for graduate medical education and to expand a sports complex
7. William Goodwin Jr., a real-estate developer, his wife, Alice, and their late son, Hunter, gave $250 million to establish Break Through Cancer, a foundation that will support cancer research
8. Joe Tsai, co-founder of Alibaba Group, and Clara Wu Tsai, co-owner of professional sports teams, through their Joe and Clara Tsai Foundation, gave $220 million to establish the Wu Tsai Human Performance Alliance, a medical research nonprofit
9. Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon gave $200 million to Smithsonian Institution’s National Air and Space Museum for an education center and museum renovations
10. Gerald Chan, co-founder of Morningside Group, an investment firm, through his Morningside Foundation gave $175 million to University of Massachusetts Chan Medical School for endowment 

Education, research and medical facilities need these donations more than ever.  Thank you!

Tony