#SootinClaimon.Com : ขอบคุณแหล่งข้อมูล : หนังสือพิมพ์ The Nation.

https://www.nationthailand.com/international/40000515

Bill and Melinda Gates, who run one of the worlds largest philanthropies, plan to divorce after 27 years

SEATTLE – Bill and Melinda Gates, who run one of the worlds largest philanthropies, are divorcing after 27 years of marriage. They both announced the divorce on Twitter in posts at the same time.

“After a great deal of thought and a lot of work on our relationship, we have made the decision to end our marriage,” they wrote. Bill Gates, the co-founder of the software giant Microsoft, has an estimated net worth of $130.5 billion, ranking him fourth on Forbes’ list of the world’s wealthiest people.

They added that together they would continue to run the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, whose mission is to enable all people to lead healthy, productive lives.

“We continue to share a belief in that mission and will continue our work together at the foundation, but we no longer believe we can grow together as a couple in this next phase of our lives,” according to the statements.

According to Melinda Gates’s divorce filing, obtained by the gossip website TMZ, the couple signed a separation contract. She is not requesting spousal support. Her filing called the marriage “irretrievably broken.” Bill Gates filed a joinder, meaning he supports the dissolution of the marriage.

The Gateses met at Microsoft, where Melinda worked developing multimedia products for the company. They married in 1994 on the Hawaiian island of Lanai. Melinda left Microsoft in 1996. The couple have three children.

The couple have spent much of the past two decades focused on their foundation. Bill Gates stepped down as chief software architect at Microsoft and gave up his day-to-day duties in 2008 to work full time at the foundation. He stepped down as Microsoft’s chairman in 2014.

Their philanthropy issued nearly $55 billion in total grant payments through the end of 2019, focusing on addressing the inequities in global health and the U.S. education systems.

The end of their marriage comes a little more than two years after another Seattle billionaire, Jeff Bezos, announced that he and his wife at the time, MacKenzie, were divorcing. Bezos, the world’s wealthiest person, founded the e-commerce giant Amazon and owns The Washington Post. Their divorce settlement, a year later, set a record, giving MacKenzie an Amazon stake worth approximately $36 billion at the time.

While the Gates Foundation has long sought to address global inequity, it focused increasingly on how to end the coronavirus pandemic, whose impact is likely to be more profound on the developing world. In the past year, the foundation has committed $1.75 billion as part of its global covid response, funding the development of vaccines, tests, and drugs, supporting efforts to testing and trace those infected, and paying to prepare health systems for rising cases in the developing world.

As the virus raged, Bill Gates, 65, emerged as a leading advocate for science-based approaches to end the pandemic. He studied infectious diseases as part of his philanthropic work and had previously warned about the potential for a pathogen-spread pandemic, notably in a prescient TED Talk in 2015. He also became a target for conspiracy theorists who claim he engineered the pandemic and is mining it for profit and leveraging it for global surveillance and population control.

Melinda Gates, 56, began to emerge from her husband’s shadow as she took a larger role at their philanthropy two decades ago. Along with her father-in-law, Bill Gates Sr., she oversaw the foundation while her husband continued his full-time work at Microsoft. In that time, she traveled the globe to see where the need for the philanthropy was greatest and to set the agenda. She also became a more prominent public figure, speaking about malaria at the White House in 2006 and before the U.N. General Assembly in 2010 about reducing poverty and halting the spread of HIV/AIDS.

While the Gateses often appeared together publicly, they rarely talked about their relationship. Melinda Gates wrote about one stressful moment in her 2019 book, “The Moment of Lift.” She recalled how Bill had written the foundation’s annual letter every year since 2007, something she felt in those early days was too much for her with young kids at home.

In 2012, Melinda brought up the idea of writing the letter Bill, something he opposed, she wrote, because he felt the process had been working just fine. But Melinda pressed her case because she felt her voice could also have impact. When they wrote their first letter together, she recalled how difficult it was.

“I thought we were going to kill each other,” Melinda Gates wrote. “I felt, ‘Well, this just might end the marriage right here.'”

They have written the letter jointly since 2014.

In addition to giving away much of their wealth, the Gateses also teamed up with billionaire investor Warren Buffett in 2010 to launch the Giving Pledge, a commitment by superwealthy people to donate at least 50% of their money to charity. It has more than 200 signatories.

The Gateses will continue to work together on foundation strategies and direction. In their tweets, the Gateses asked for “space and privacy for our family as we begin to navigate this new life.”

Published : May 04, 2021

By : The Washington Post · Jay Greene

#SootinClaimon.Com : ขอบคุณแหล่งข้อมูล : หนังสือพิมพ์ The Nation.

https://www.nationthailand.com/international/40000512

CIA officer used experience to write realistic spy thrillers

Jason Matthews, who parlayed his 33 years as a CIA officer into a second career as a best-selling spy novelist, writing scenes so gripping and vivid that some readers thought he was violating the agencys strict secrecy protocols, died April 28 at his home in Rancho Mirage, Calif. He was 69.

The cause was corticobasal degeneration, a degenerative neurological disease, said his wife, Suzanne Matthews.

With the CIA, Matthews was a practitioner of “human intelligence,” or the one-to-one cultivation of sources who might provide information about hostile countries. During his nine overseas assignments, he often worked behind the lines of enemy countries in what the CIA called “internal operations.”

In outposts across Europe, Asia and the Caribbean, Matthews recruited agents and used the classic spy techniques of dead drops – leaving a message in a public place to be picked up later – and brush passes, when two people brush against each other in a crowded place and surreptitiously exchange information.

He knew how to walk or drive in circuitous patterns to lose anyone who might be tailing him and could detect tension or deception in the faces of people he was interviewing. He became so adept that the CIA made him an instructor and later the chief of internal operations.

Matthews, who spoke seven languages, worked abroad under the mantle of the State Department. His wife was also a CIA officer for more than three decades, making them among the agency’s few “tandem couples,” or married spies.

For the most part, however, their life of espionage contained little glamour and less action. Matthews said he spent most of his time in the office, doing research and filing reports. He called his work “clandestine journalism.”

His cables to CIA headquarters in Langley, Va., became known for their graceful writing and precise scene-setting.

“Without bragging or hyperbole,” Matthews told Men’s Journal in 2015, “you had to write a very careful, descriptive account of who you saw, what you did and some of the atmospherics.”

After retiring in 2010 – his final post was at an obscure CIA station in Los Angeles – Matthews followed other intelligence officers, including John le Carré, Graham Greene and Charles McCarry, and began to weave his experiences into fiction.

His first novel, “Red Sparrow,” was published in 2013 and portrayed a Russian ballerina, Dominika Egorova, recruited by her country’s spy service. She was sent for special training to the “Sparrow School” – based on an actual Soviet-era training site – in which women (and some men) learned the arts of seduction, spying and killing. She falls in love with an American CIA officer, and action ensues, from Moscow to Rome to Washington and several bedrooms in between.

Literary scholar Art Taylor, in a review in The Washington Post, called “Red Sparrow” a “sublime and sophisticated debut . . . a first-rate novel as noteworthy for its superior style as for its gripping depiction of a secretive world.”

Matthews was praised for his plotting and characterizations, such as this sketch of a Russian spy official: “His eyes were dull and watery, his teeth corrugated and stained, and he slouched with the familiar casual authority honed on the razor strop of decades of Soviet officialdom. His tie was askew, his suit was a washed-out brown that recalled low tide at the beach.”

What most impressed aficionados of spy fiction, however, was the realism Matthews brought to the methods of spying itself, or tradecraft.

“Lord knows how he got the manuscript of ‘Red Sparrow’ past the redacting committee at Langley,” British spy novelist Charles Cumming wrote in the New York Times. He added: “I have rarely encountered a nonfiction title, much less a novel, so rich in what would once have been regarded as classified information.”

Matthews insisted that the “CIA approved every comma, every semicolon of my book.” The practices described in the books, his wife said in an interview, were no longer in use.

“Red Sparrow” received the Edgar Allan Poe Award from the Mystery Writers of America for best first novel by a U.S. author. It was adapted for a 2018 film starring Jennifer Lawrence, with Matthews serving as technical adviser.

He published two sequels with the same characters – including scenes featuring Russian President Vladimir Putin. “Palace of Treason,” which examined Iran’s nuclear program, appeared in 2015, followed three years later by “The Kremlin’s Candidate,” in which Putin seeks to install a Russian puppet as CIA director.

In all of his books, Matthews concluded each chapter with a recipe suggested by the plot.

“I like to cook, and our family certainly enjoyed the various cuisines of the countries we lived in,” he said. “The recipes are elliptical and abbreviated. They’re more like clues than formal recipes.”

James Jason Matthews was born Sept. 17, 1951, in Hartford, Conn. He grew up speaking Greek at home. (His grandfather’s name was changed when he came to the United States.)

Matthews’s father developed a way of making flash-frozen pies and sold the technique to a food company. The family later operated a sailing ship on excursions from Mystic, Conn.

After graduating from the private Mount Hermon school (now Northfield Mount Hermon) in Massachusetts, Matthews studied Spanish and French at Washington & Lee University in Lexington, Va. He graduated in 1973.

He received a master’s degree in journalism from the University of Missouri in 1975, then came to Washington, expecting “to be writing brochures for the Forest Service.” He had several job interviews, including one in a “nondescript building in Rosslyn, Virginia,” he told Men’s Journal in 2015. “Gray little office. Gray little man.”

It turned out to be the CIA, which Matthews joined in late 1976.

He met his wife, the former Suzanne Moran, who was already in the CIA, on an overseas assignment. They married in 1983.

In addition to his wife, survivors include two daughters, Sophia Baumann of Manhattan Beach, Calif., and Alexandra Matthews of Brooklyn; a brother; and a granddaughter.

Matthews said he never shot anyone while in the CIA, but he had some close calls.

“Whenever we picked up the phone for 33 years, depending on where we were, we knew it was bugged, we knew it was monitored,” he told the Journal News of White Plains, N.Y., in 2015. “And same thing with rooms. We would get up sometimes in our apartment and walk through the living room to get to the kitchen in the morning and there would be a stubbed out cigarette in the ashtray. The entry teams had come in at night and had left just a little sign that they’d been there.”

When it came time to retire, he was not sure what to do. He had long been an admirer of the novels of le Carré and McCarry, and one day he sat down at his daughter’s computer and began to write.

“Being in the agency is a very experiential career, like being a policeman or a fireman or a jet pilot,” Matthews told the New York Times in 2015, “and when it stops, it really stops. There are retiree groups that get together, mostly in Washington, and sit around and swap war stories, but I was living in California, and it was either write something or go fishing.”

Published : May 04, 2021

By : The Washington Post · Matt Schudel

#SootinClaimon.Com : ขอบคุณแหล่งข้อมูล : หนังสือพิมพ์ The Nation.

https://www.nationthailand.com/international/40000511

EPA sends Virgin Islands oil refinery a violation notice

WASHINGTON – A giant oil and gas refinery was served with a “notice of violation” by the Environmental Protection Agency after two major incidents that released noxious fumes and a chemical-filled vapor cloud over nearby neighborhoods in the U.S. Virgin Islands.

The EPA said Monday that Limetree Bay Refining was served with the notice because the company did not operate five monitoring stations to gauge the air quality around its plant, a major source of harmful greenhouse gas emissions. The company also did not operate a meteorological tower.

“A major source of air pollution, such as Limetree Bay, is subject to controls under its air permits,” the agency said in a statement.

“Limetree Bay may be liable for civil penalties and required to take actions to correct the violations,” the statement said. The company has 30 days to request a video conference to discuss or contest the notice of violation.

In a statement Monday, the company contested EPA’s allegations.

“We strongly disagree with the claim that we are in violation of any ambient air monitoring requirement,” it said. “The former refinery operator was required to perform area monitoring, but that requirement was linked exclusively to their burning of sulfur-containing residual fuel oil, which Limetree Bay does not do.”

The plant’s previous owner, Hovensa, stopped operating five sulfur dioxide monitoring stations when it shut down in 2012 in the wake of financial problems and a multimillion-dollar settlement with the EPA over environmental violations. At the time, according to the notice, Hovensa pledged to reactivate the monitors if it restarted.

A Limetree employee informed the EPA on Feb. 16 – more than two weeks after the plant started running again – that it was not operating the air monitors, the notice added.

Short-term exposures to high levels of sulfur dioxide can damage the human respiratory system. People with asthma, especially children, are vulnerable.

“EPA issued this notice of violation to protect the people who live near and work at this refinery, and we have also deployed a team of experts to St. Croix and are working to assess Limetree Bay’s compliance with environmental laws,” said Walter Mugdan, the acting chief of EPA Region 2, which oversees the U.S. Virgin Islands.

In conjunction with the U.S. Virgin Islands Department of Planning and Natural Resources and the U.S. Virgin Department of Health, the EPA is investigating the extent of the release of gas, its composition, duration and causes.

The EPA also ordered inspections of the facility “over the course of the coming months” to focus on compliance with various environmental statutes.

“Limetree Bay is in a community predominantly made up of people of color and low-income populations who are already disproportionately affected by environmental burdens,” the statement said. “These disproportionate burdens present environmental justice concerns, which are a priority for EPA.”

Within days after reopening this year, a pressure-release valve sent on Feb. 4 a fine mist of oil and water over hundreds of homes that neighbor the facility. The mist rained oil onto rooftops, home gardens, car hoods and cisterns that residents rely on for drinking and washing.

Less than two months later, it emitted sulfuric gases that led some schools and a coronavirus vaccination site to close. One resident, Sonya Rivera, said “a foul, funky smell” descended over her home. Others said a stench of rotten eggs or sewage lingered for more than a week.

In its statement, the EPA said it relies on refineries to measure sulfur dioxide in the atmosphere so it can better control a population’s exposure to the gas.

Published : May 04, 2021

By : The Washington Post · Darryl Fears, Juliet Eilperin

#SootinClaimon.Com : ขอบคุณแหล่งข้อมูล : หนังสือพิมพ์ The Nation.

https://www.nationthailand.com/international/40000510

FBI shoots, wounds person outside CIA headquarters

WASHINGTON – At least one FBI agent shot and wounded a person outside CIA headquarters in McLean, Va., early Monday evening, the bureau said, asserting that the person emerged from his vehicle with a weapon.

The FBI released few details about the encounter and the person who was shot. In a one-paragraph statement, the bureau said the person had been involved “security incident” outside CIA headquarters before he “emerged from his vehicle with a weapon.” He was taken to the hospital after the shooting for treatment of his wounds, the bureau said.

The bureau did not identify the suspect or detail the nature of his wounds, nor did it describe the weapon it said he was carrying. The shooting occurred at about 6 p.m., the bureau said.

Officials familiar with the matter, speaking on the condition of anonymity to describe an ongoing investigation, said that the person had pulled up to the security gate outside CIA headquarters hours earlier, and that the shooting occurred after lengthy negotiation with him. The FBI said it was reviewing the incident.

“The FBI takes all shooting incidents involving our agents or task force members seriously,” the bureau said. “The review process is thorough and objective, and is conducted as expeditiously as possible under the circumstances.”

The shooting was first reported by NBC News.

The CIA said in a statement before the shooting that its compound had remained secured, and that its protective officers were “the only Agency personnel directly involved” in the incident. The agency later referred questions to the FBI.

The security perimeter is tight around CIA headquarters, often waylaying drivers who erroneously find their way driving toward the campus.

In 1993, a man who said he was protesting U.S. policies toward Muslims, shot and killed five people outside the facility, then successfully fled to Pakistan and Afghanistan for 4 1/2 years.

The man, Mir Aimal Kasi, was eventually brought back to the United States, convicted and sentenced to death. He was executed by injection in 2002.

The bureau is famously tight-lipped about releasing information when its agents are involved in shootings, and because FBI agents do not generally do street patrols or respond to basic calls for service, they are involved in fewer such incidents than many local police departments.

But agents have been involved in high-profile and sometimes controversial shootings over the years. An FBI agent was charged criminally with lying about firing at a self-styled militia leader who was killed in 2016 in an encounter stemming from a standoff with law enforcement at a federal wildlife refuge in Oregon. The agent was ultimately acquitted.

Published : May 04, 2021

By : The Washington Post · Matt Zapotosky

#SootinClaimon.Com : ขอบคุณแหล่งข้อมูล : หนังสือพิมพ์ The Nation.

https://www.nationthailand.com/international/40000509

U.S. trustee opposes NRA bankruptcy petition

A U.S. bankruptcy administrator asked a federal judge on Monday to dismiss the National Rifle Associations efforts to declare bankruptcy or appoint a trustee or examiner to oversee the gun rights organization – a setback for the group at the close of a federal court hearing to consider its petition.

The recommendation bolstered the arguments of New York Attorney General Letitia James, a Democrat, whose office has fought the NRA’s attempts to relocate from New York to Texas, and came after senior NRA executives acknowledged in court testimony that they received lavish perks.

Linda Lambert, a lawyer with the U.S. trustee’s office – which participates in bankruptcy cases to protect taxpayer interests and enforce bankruptcy laws – told the court that the evidence presented in the hearing showed that the nonprofit organization lacked proper oversight and that personal expenses were masked as business costs.

Adam Levitin, a bankruptcy expert at the Georgetown University Law Center, said the position of the trustee – a Justice Department official who typically remains neutral in a bankruptcy proceeding – does not bode well for the NRA.

“I don’t see how the NRA pulls off a win here,” he said, adding: “I think it’s pretty clear that the NRA loses. The real question is what the remedy will be.”

In court on Monday, NRA attorney Greg Garman expressed disappointment in Lambert’s comments, saying: “We have natural enemies. This Department of Justice may not see eye to eye with the National Rifle Association, but so be it, we have done the right thing.”

The NRA began considering bankruptcy last year after James filed a lawsuit seeking to dissolve the gun organization, alleging that senior NRA executives used the organization to benefit themselves and their friends.

The NRA responded by accusing the attorney general of pursuing a political agenda. The group announced in January that it was declaring bankruptcy and moving from New York, where it was founded in 1871, to Texas, where the state attorney general and other officials offered a warm welcome.

On Monday, Gerrit Pronske, an attorney for New York state, called the gun lobby’s attempted move “a circus sideshow” designed to avoid legal accountability, warning that approving its reorganization plan risked turning bankruptcy courts into “a haven for wrongdoers.”

Garman countered that the bankruptcy plan was vital to the survival and future success of what he termed “an irreplaceable” civil rights organization.

“There is no one who stands in the breach to defend the Second Amendment other than the NRA,” Garman said in his closing arguments Monday afternoon.

The NRA has said it is in sound financial condition but needs to file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection because of the existential threat presented by James’s lawsuit.

Judge Harlin Hale is considering the complex case from his Dallas courtroom, hearing requests through videoconference from New York state and other parties to dismiss the NRA bankruptcy petition and, if that fails, to appoint a trustee to run the organization while it is in bankruptcy.

Hale has said he expects to issue a decision in about a week.

The hearing called renewed attention to the inner workings of the long-powerful gun lobby as President Joe Biden and congressional Democrats have called for new gun regulations after a rash of deadly shootings across the country.

The NRA submitted a reorganization plan Monday that calls for payment of outstanding debts and leaving in place the current management – including longtime NRA chief Wayne LaPierre. The plan was approved Sunday in a closed-door meeting of the NRA board, according to a person familiar with the vote, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss the session.

NRA lawyers argued throughout the bankruptcy hearing that LaPierre has been an effective manager and a fundraising powerhouse for the group, which says it has more than 5 million members. The lawyers said LaPierre has imposed more rigorous fiscal management in recent years and noted that the reorganization plan calls for a compliance officer, a new position in the organization.

Under questioning from New York state’s attorneys, LaPierre acknowledged that he did not disclose receiving lavish perks, including access to luxurious yachts and $300,000 in suits from an exclusive Beverly Hills boutique.

The hearing also pulled back the curtain on the internal actions of top NRA officials.

Several witnesses testified that LaPierre did not inform the full NRA board or its general counsel of plans to declare bankruptcy before announcing it publicly.

The NRA’s current president, Carolyn Meadows, acknowledged in testimony read into the record that she destroyed notes and records in advance of subpoena from the New York attorney general. Meadows testified that the records that were discarded included medical information.

Attorneys for the NRA acknowledged during the hearing that “cringeworthy activity” had occurred in the past – but they maintained that governance had improved under LaPierre, who they said showed a willingness to fire NRA executives who had misused their positions.

“It is very, very true that we don’t run from what happened before 2018, but, your honor, we are safe, we are secure, we are a well-run organization,” Garman said Monday. “We have responsible new parties in place to ensure that the transparency, the trustworthiness that the court and the parties require is here.”

Published : May 04, 2021

By : The Washington Post · Tom Hamburger