TBR News September 3, 2018
The voice of him that crieth in the wilderness, Isaiah 40:3-8
Washington, D.C. September 3, 2018: “Many years ago, Soviet planners gave up trying to match the US Navy ship for ship, gun for gun, and dollar for dollar. The Soviets simply could not compete with the high levels of US spending required to build up and maintain a huge naval armada. They shrewdly adopted an alternative approach based on strategic defense. They searched for weaknesses, and sought relatively inexpensive ways to exploit those weaknesses. The Soviets succeeded: by developing several supersonic anti-ship missiles, one of which has been called “the most lethal missile in the world today.”
After the collapse of the Soviet Union the old military establishment fell upon hard times. But in the late 1990s Moscow awakened to the under-utilized potential of its missile technology to generate desperately needed foreign exchange. A decision was made to resuscitate selected programs, and, very soon, Russian missile technology became a hot export commodity. Today, Russian missiles are a growth industry generating much-needed cash for Russia, with many billions in combined sales to India, China, Viet Nam, Cuba, and also Iran. In the near future this dissemination of advanced technology is likely to present serious challenges to the US. Some have even warned that the US Navy’s largest ships, the massive carriers, have now become floating death traps, and should for this reason be mothballed.”
The Table of Contents
- Donald Trump has said 2291 false things as U.S. president: No. 13
- Trump is dangerous again as his Kim Jong-un ‘breakthrough’ turns sour
- Why Donald Trump’s trade war with China is sure to fail
- Louvre Abu Dhabi postpones display of Leonardo’s Salvator Mundi
- Is Leonardo da Vinci’s Salvator Mundi fake? Is there a consensus from art scholars?
- Fake Hitler items being made and sold
- A 5-Year-Old Girl in Immigrant Detention Nearly Died of an Untreated Ruptured Appendix
Donald Trump has said 2291 false things as U.S. president: No. 13 August 8, 2018
by Daniel Dale, Washington Bureau Chief
The Toronto Star, Canada
The Star is keeping track of every false claim U.S. President Donald Trump has made since his inauguration on Jan. 20, 2017. Why? Historians say there has never been such a constant liar in the Oval Office. We think dishonesty should be challenged. We think inaccurate information should be corrected
If Trump is a serial liar, why call this a list of “false claims,” not lies? You can read our detailed explanation here. The short answer is that we can’t be sure that each and every one was intentional. In some cases, he may have been confused or ignorant. What we know, objectively, is that he was not teling the truth.
Last updated: Aug 8, 2018
- May 10, 2017
“For years, as a pol in Connecticut, (Democratic Sen. Richard) Blumenthal would talk of his great bravery and conquests in Vietnam – except he was never there.”
Source: Twitter
in fact: Here, Trump takes a kernel of truth and turns it into a false claim. He is correct that Blumenthal falsely claimed he had served in Vietnam, when, in fact, Blumenthal had obtained several deferments and eventually served in the Marine Reserve in the U.S. But Blumenthal did not speak of “his great bravery and conquests” in Vietnam, merely of being there.
Trump has repeated this claim 2 times
- May 13, 2017
“Everybody also agrees it (Russia’s hacking) didn’t change the election. Didn’t change it at all. So that’s important. That’s important to me.”
Source: Interview with Fox News’s Jeanine Pirro
in fact: Many people — including much of the Democratic Party — do not agree. While the true impact of the hacking is impossible to prove either way, it is inaccurate to say there is a consensus view that it was inconsequential.
“Podesta — who by the way has a company with his brother as I understand it in Russia…”
Source: Interview with Fox News’s Jeanine Pirro
in fact: John Podesta, who served as chairman as Hillary Clinton’s campaign, does not have a company in Russia, either alone or with his brother Tony Podesta, a prominent lobbyist. Tony Podesta does not have any company in Russia, a spokesman for his company says.
Trump has repeated this claim 5 times
“(James) Clapper is convinced, other people are convinced, everybody is convinced. They’re saying there is no collusion…they’re all saying there is no collusion, there is no collusion.”
Source: Interview with Fox News’s Jeanine Pirro
in fact: It is not true that everybody is convinced there was no collusion between his campaign and Russian meddling in the presidential election; the FBI, in fact, is investigating whether there was collusion or not. The day after Trump taped this interview, Clapper, the former director of national intelligence, made clear that he does not know if there was collusion or not.
Trump has repeated this claim 18 times
“Cory Booker ought to get his address right where he lived when he ran for mayor. That’s what he ought to do.”
Source: Interview with Fox News’s Jeanine Pirro
in fact: This is Trump falsely suggesting that Booker, now a senator for New Jersey, provided inaccurate information about his residency when he ran for mayor of Newark. In fact, he did not. The conservative website Daily Caller published a story in 2013 claiming that Booker did not actually live in the city, but the claim was definitively debunked that same week.
“Another president, Jeanine, will sit in the Oval Office and do practically nothing all day. I’m doing every minute of the day, I’m doing something.”
Source: Interview with Fox News’s Jeanine Pirro
in fact: There is no evidence at all that pre-Trump presidents have sat around doing nothing.
“Don’t forget: before the election, the Republicans were going to lose the Senate, going to lose the House, and going to lose, of course, the presidency.” “We were supposed to lose all three. And not only did we lose all three — they said it will be perhaps the greatest election failure in the history of this country.”
Source: Interview with Fox News’s Jeanine Pirro
in fact: Trump is correct that he defied conventional wisdom in winning the presidency, and also that conventional wisdom held that the Republicans would lose control of the Senate. But he goes wrong in saying they were “supposed to lose all three” — the overwhelming majority of analysts believed that the Republicans would maintain control of the House of Representatives.
“Obamacare is dead.”
Source: Interview with Fox News’s Jeanine Pirro
in fact: We allow Trump rhetorical license to call Obamacare “collapsing” and even “exploding,” though experts say neither is true. But it is plainly false to say the law is “dead.” While its marketplaces have problems, they are still functioning and providing insurance to millions; so is its Medicaid expansion.
Trump has repeated this claim 33 times
- May 18, 2017
“The other is something I can only tell you: there was no collusion. And everybody — even my enemies have said, there is no collusion.”
Source: Joint press conference with Colombian President Juan Mauel Santos
in fact: Trump’s enemies have not said this.
Trump has repeated this claim 18 times
“Obamacare is collapsing. It’s dead; it’s gone. There’s nothing to compare anything to because we don’t have healthcare in this country.”
Source: Joint press conference with Colombian President Juan Mauel Santos
in fact: Obamacare has problems, but it very much exists, and it continues to provide health insurance to millions. Experts have indeed managed to compare Trump’s health plan to Obamacare; the Congressional Budget Office has concluded that the second version of the plan would leave 23 million additional people without health insurance in 2026.
Trump has repeated this claim 33 times
“But they’ve literally taken over towns and cities of the United States.”
Source: Joint press conference with Colombian President Juan Mauel Santos
in fact: MS-13 has not “literally taken over” towns and cities.
“And MS-13, likewise — a horrible, horrible, large group of gangs that have been let into our country over a fairly short period of time…”
Source: Joint press conference with Colombian President Juan Mauel Santos
in fact: MS-13 originated in the U.S.; it was not “let in” from abroad, although some current members were born abroad. The gang has existed since the 1980s, so Trump’s “fairly short period of time” may be additionally misleading.
Trump has repeated this claim 2 times
- May 21, 2017
“A new spirit of optimism is sweeping our country: in just a few months, we have…made record investments in our military that will protect the safety of our people and enhance the security of our wonderful friends and allies.”
Source: Saudi Arabia speech on terrorism and Islam
in fact: Trump is not making record investments in the military. The Associated Press reports: “The 10 percent increase he called for in his March budget outline has been exceeded three times in recent history — the base military budget went up by 14.3 percent, in 2002, 11.3 percent in 2003 and 10.9 percent in 2008, according to the Pentagon.”
Trump has repeated this claim 10 times
- May 25, 2017
“Many of these nations owe massive amounts of money from past years and not paying in those past years.”
Source: Speech at NATO
in fact: NATO members don’t owe money to the alliance or to the U.S. Though many of them, as Trump noted, have fallen short of reaching the alliance’s guideline of spending 2 per cent of their gross domestic product on defence, this is not the same as a debt.
Trump has repeated this claim 13 times
- May 27, 2017
“We have already made a historic investment in defense spending — you’ve been reading about it — because we believe — and you know this.”
Source: Speech to troops in Italy
in fact: Trump’s proposed increase in defence spending, of about 10 per cent, is not historic. “In just the past 40 years, there have been eight years with larger increases in percentage terms than the one he’s now proposing,” the Associated Press reported. “there have been 27 years since 1940 in which the military spending was as high or higher than the proposed increase,” the New York Times reported.
Trump has repeated this claim 10 times
Trump is dangerous again as his Kim Jong-un ‘breakthrough’ turns sour
Faced by the collapse of his only diplomatic ‘achievement’ and worried about support at home, the president could go rogue
September 3, 2018
by Simon Tisdall
The Guardian
Remember all the hoo-ha over Donald Trump’s summit in June with North Korea’s maverick dictator, Kim Jong-un? With typical immodesty, Trump proclaimed a historic diplomatic breakthrough. Overnight, his Love Island-style tryst in Singapore had made the world a better place. “Everybody can now feel much safer than the day I took office,” Trump tweeted. “There is no longer a nuclear threat from North Korea.”
Hogwash. North Korea is fast emerging as the definitive example of how Trump takes a pre-existing international crisis and makes it worse. Claiming negotiating skills and a political prescience he does not possess, lacking thought-through and coherent strategies and ignoring the experience of more knowledgeable predecessors, he crassly blunders into sensitive situations, loud mouth blaring. US policy in Iran, Syria and Palestine has been similarly, anarchically upended.
The shattering of the false hopes raised by Trump in Singapore has not taken long. In a letter delivered last week, Kim reportedly threatened to resume nuclear weapons and missile tests. Talks on denuclearisation of the Korean peninsula – the summit’s sole, vaguely tangible outcome – have stalled. Their future is “again at stake and may fall apart”, the letter said, because Trump had reneged on understandings reached with Kim and subsequently zig-zagged to a harder position.
In familiar knee-jerk fashion, Trump responded by scrapping a visit to North Korea by his secretary of state, Mike Pompeo. He then publicly blamed China, not his own muddled messages, for undermining the US-led sanctions policy of “maximum pressure”. The Pentagon followed up on Tuesday by suggesting that joint allied military exercises in the Korean theatre – suspended by Trump in a high-handed and unreciprocated concession – might soon resume.
Quite how Trump expects the talks to succeed if he bans his top diplomat from talking is unclear. Exactly why Trump believes China – with much at stake in North Korea – will follow his lead on sanctions while he simultaneously wages a trade war on Beijing is a mystery. And how long he can keep on pretending the nuclear menace is over, when the UN’s International Atomic Energy Agency reports authoritatively that it is not?
The implosion of Trump’s deceptive Korean “breakthrough” risks some dreadful consequences. One is the sabotaging of separate, commendable efforts by Moon Jae-in, South Korea’s president, to restore bilateral trust and cooperation. American bungling has thrown into question Moon’s planned visit to Pyongyang next month – and has certainly rendered it more difficult. Another key ally, Japan, has no illusions, dismissing Trump’s big triumph as a flop. North Korea continued to pose a “serious and imminent” threat, Tokyo declared this week.
Trump’s over-reaching, and subsequent reneging, is likely to enrage the Pyongyang regime, where hardliners are already crying betrayal. Kim himself may feel humiliated by Trump’s failure to fulfil dangled promises about a peace treaty or formal diplomatic recognition. The result could be a redoubling of the north’s efforts to build weapons of mass destruction and a rapid reigniting of regional military tensions.
Most dangerously of all, faced by the imminent collapse of his signal diplomatic “achievement” and worried about his standing among supporters ahead of November’s mid-term elections, Trump may revert to his previous, reckless posture. It is less than a year since he threatened to “totally destroy” North Korea by raining “fire and fury” on its civilian population. If Trump goes rogue again, there may be no coming back this time.
For now at least, US diplomats say they are not giving up on denuclearisation and detente. And it may be that Kim is playing hardball in a bid to win more concessions prior to resuming talks. But such calculations ignore Trump’s volatile temperament and aggressive instincts. He could lose it at any moment. Meanwhile, it’s vital to nail the lie, promulgated on the Republican right, that his chaotic foreign policy is working.
The deleterious impact of the “Trump effect” on other international hotspots can be seen in Palestine, where his funding cuts and tilt towards Israel over Jerusalem have rendered the peace process moribund. It is evident in Syria, too, where Russia’s bombers, unbelievably, have been given free rein; and in Iran, the undeserving target of unrestrained, highly provocative (and arguably illegal) American economic warfare.
Trump, who continues to address tweets to his supposed pal “Chairman Kim” is not the first American president to personalise foreign policy, convinced that he, uniquely, has the insight and charisma required to solve problems others believe insoluble. In maintaining, without any evidence, that he alone knows how to “handle” Kim, Trump follows in the footsteps of Franklin Roosevelt, who nurtured a similar conceit about Joseph “Uncle Joe” Stalin. In the event, as the historian Antony Beevor has recorded, Stalin ran rings around Roosevelt in 1945 when negotiating the postwar European order. Trump’s naive and egotistic blundering threatens more made-in-America disasters from east Asia to the Middle East and Europe.
Why Donald Trump’s trade war with China is sure to fail
August 30, 2018
by Darius Shahtahmasebi
RT
The woes and risks of Donald Trump’s ill-advised trade war are fast becoming a reality, endorsed even by the corporate media.
Trump wants to play hardball with China. On Monday, the US president said that now “was not the right time to talk” to China about the ongoing and escalating trade war currently taking place between the two economic powers, just after negotiations between the two countries ended without any meaningful resolutions.
“It’s just not the right time to talk right now, to be honest with China,” Trump reportedly said.
“It’s too one-sided for too many years and too many decades, and so it’s not the right time to talk. But eventually, I’m sure that we’ll be able to work out a deal with China.”
Now is not the time to talk to China, apparently, but it is the time to talk to Mexico, the country Trump accused of sending rapists, criminals and drug dealers into the US, while ordering it to fund his $70 billion wall in the process.
Despite Trump’s staunch anti-Chinese rhetoric, senior administration officials appeared to indicate that the US would be open to further negotiations with China, which in turn was welcomed by the Chinese government. There was some short-lived hope for a resolution process last week as a Chinese delegation, led by China’s vice-minister of commerce Wang Shouwen played their hand at low-level talks in Washington, hosted by the US Treasury’s Under Secretary for international affairs David Malpass.
However, these talks were mostly doomed to fail from the outset, given Trump’s active hostility towards China; considering also the previous negotiations held in May and June this year. Even so, a statement from China’s Commerce Ministry remained hopeful, saying that the two countries had “constructive and frank exchanges” and would continue to “keep in touch about next steps.”
So, what’s behind this trade war policy adopted by the US, and where will it lead us in the long run?
The short answer to this question is that Trump’s trade war will backfire on too many levels against the US. This is not just the ramblings of an anti-Trump, anti-US, foreign policy writer, this is fast becoming a mainstream view.
US firms have more than $220 billion invested in China, according to the American Chamber of Commerce in the People’s Republic of China (AmCham China). China has no choice but to hit back at the US and punish American companies for the war that their country’s president has kicked off. In June this year, Chinese president Xi Jinping reportedly warned that Beijing would retaliate. “In the West you have the notion that if somebody hits you on the left cheek, you turn the other cheek. In our culture we punch back,” the Chinese leader was quoted as saying.
Last month, the Trump administration put into effect a 25 percent tariff on $34 billion worth of Chinese goods, which has – lo and behold – been met in turn by China’s 25 percent levy on $34 billion worth of US-made products. Supposedly, China’s reciprocity is set to target 545 US products worth this latter amount, including soybeans, whiskey, orange juice, electric cars, salmon and cigars. Renegotiating NAFTA has already raised a strong level of uncertainty for these US businesses, and China’s efforts to hit back will only impact upon American companies harder.
China has also already begun implementing what it warned would be “qualitative measures” which are completely disrupting US manufacturers and exporters. One such example is that, according to the Washington Post, one US exporter of vehicles to China recorded a 98 percent increase in random border inspections over the past month, which noticeably interrupted the company’s export schedule.
No one seems to have considered that China may be able to weather the storm a little bit better than the US will. This may in part be due to the weakening yuan, which entails that the effects of the tariffs might not be as strong as Trump himself may have initially predicted.
According to the July reading of the Chinese government’s purchasing managers index (PMI), China did not see a sharp drop-off in exports, which appeared to hold reasonably steady.
In case you need this spelling out for you, consider this brief passage from Quartz: “The yuan makes Chinese exports to the US relatively cheaper, dampening the effects of US tariffs. And for Chinese businesses and consumers, a weaker yuan makes imports of American goods even more expensive—amplifying the impact of China’s retaliatory tariffs.”
If the yuan continues this trend, it will require China to buy less US goods in order to sustain itself, while there is no indication that the US will buy less Chinese goods since the tariffs came into effect.
Peking University professor Michael Pettis has argued that Trump’s trade war will in fact not slow down the Chinese economy on any meaningful level because the Chinese government will provide a fiscal stimulus to cancel out the fall in exports to the US. Pettis believes that no matter how severe, Chinese GDP will remain unaffected by Trump’s trade war because the Chinese government will do whatever is necessary to meet its growth targets.
That is some amazing 4-D Chess; or perhaps Trump is simply a moron.
The other thing to keep in mind that not many commentators appear to be taking into account, is the fact that China is not simply rolling over and firing back at the US through a tit-for-tat tariff policy, but is actively looking at ways to outmanoeuvre the US in the long term.
For example, in the last few months reports began emerging that Chinese money production plants are running at nearly full capacity in order to meet an unusually high quota set by the government, with only a small proportion of the orders being for Chinese yuan bills. That’s right; the China Banknote Printing and Minting Corporation, arguably the world’s largest money printer, is printing money for several countries, including Nepal, Thailand, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Malaysia, India, Brazil and Poland. According to one source in the corporation, the actual number of countries that plan to outsource currency printing to China could be even higher. One thing that these countries will mostly have in common is a desire or indication that they will take part in China’s monumental Silk and Road Project, a looming economic headache for the US.
China has also already begun implementing what it warned would be “qualitative measures” which are completely disrupting US manufacturers and exporters. One such example is that, according to the Washington Post, one US exporter of vehicles to China recorded a 98 percent increase in random border inspections over the past month, which noticeably interrupted the company’s export schedule.
No one seems to have considered that China may be able to weather the storm a little bit better than the US will. This may in part be due to the weakening yuan, which entails that the effects of the tariffs might not be as strong as Trump himself may have initially predicted.
According to the July reading of the Chinese government’s purchasing managers index (PMI), China did not see a sharp drop-off in exports, which appeared to hold reasonably steady.
In case you need this spelling out for you, consider this brief passage from Quartz: “The yuan makes Chinese exports to the US relatively cheaper, dampening the effects of US tariffs. And for Chinese businesses and consumers, a weaker yuan makes imports of American goods even more expensive—amplifying the impact of China’s retaliatory tariffs.”
If the yuan continues this trend, it will require China to buy less US goods in order to sustain itself, while there is no indication that the US will buy less Chinese goods since the tariffs came into effect.
Peking University professor Michael Pettis has argued that Trump’s trade war will in fact not slow down the Chinese economy on any meaningful level because the Chinese government will provide a fiscal stimulus to cancel out the fall in exports to the US. Pettis believes that no matter how severe, Chinese GDP will remain unaffected by Trump’s trade war because the Chinese government will do whatever is necessary to meet its growth targets.
That is some amazing 4-D Chess; or perhaps Trump is simply a moron.
The other thing to keep in mind that not many commentators appear to be taking into account, is the fact that China is not simply rolling over and firing back at the US through a tit-for-tat tariff policy, but is actively looking at ways to outmanoeuvre the US in the long term.
For example, in the last few months reports began emerging that Chinese money production plants are running at nearly full capacity in order to meet an unusually high quota set by the government, with only a small proportion of the orders being for Chinese yuan bills. That’s right; the China Banknote Printing and Minting Corporation, arguably the world’s largest money printer, is printing money for several countries, including Nepal, Thailand, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Malaysia, India, Brazil and Poland. According to one source in the corporation, the actual number of countries that plan to outsource currency printing to China could be even higher. One thing that these countries will mostly have in common is a desire or indication that they will take part in China’s monumental Silk and Road Project, a looming economic headache for the US.
China has also already begun implementing what it warned would be “qualitative measures” which are completely disrupting US manufacturers and exporters. One such example is that, according to the Washington Post, one US exporter of vehicles to China recorded a 98 percent increase in random border inspections over the past month, which noticeably interrupted the company’s export schedule.
No one seems to have considered that China may be able to weather the storm a little bit better than the US will. This may in part be due to the weakening yuan, which entails that the effects of the tariffs might not be as strong as Trump himself may have initially predicted.
According to the July reading of the Chinese government’s purchasing managers index (PMI), China did not see a sharp drop-off in exports, which appeared to hold reasonably steady.
In case you need this spelling out for you, consider this brief passage from Quartz: “The yuan makes Chinese exports to the US relatively cheaper, dampening the effects of US tariffs. And for Chinese businesses and consumers, a weaker yuan makes imports of American goods even more expensive—amplifying the impact of China’s retaliatory tariffs.”
If the yuan continues this trend, it will require China to buy less US goods in order to sustain itself, while there is no indication that the US will buy less Chinese goods since the tariffs came into effect.
Peking University professor Michael Pettis has argued that Trump’s trade war will in fact not slow down the Chinese economy on any meaningful level because the Chinese government will provide a fiscal stimulus to cancel out the fall in exports to the US. Pettis believes that no matter how severe, Chinese GDP will remain unaffected by Trump’s trade war because the Chinese government will do whatever is necessary to meet its growth targets.
That is some amazing 4-D Chess; or perhaps Trump is simply a moron.
The other thing to keep in mind that not many commentators appear to be taking into account, is the fact that China is not simply rolling over and firing back at the US through a tit-for-tat tariff policy, but is actively looking at ways to outmanoeuvre the US in the long term.
For example, in the last few months reports began emerging that Chinese money production plants are running at nearly full capacity in order to meet an unusually high quota set by the government, with only a small proportion of the orders being for Chinese yuan bills. That’s right; the China Banknote Printing and Minting Corporation, arguably the world’s largest money printer, is printing money for several countries, including Nepal, Thailand, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Malaysia, India, Brazil and Poland. According to one source in the corporation, the actual number of countries that plan to outsource currency printing to China could be even higher. One thing that these countries will mostly have in common is a desire or indication that they will take part in China’s monumental Silk and Road Project, a looming economic headache for the US.
This is crucial because it is this complete misperception that China’s economy is in a battered, bedridden condition that has empowered Donald Trump to escalate the current standoff and state that now is “not the right time to talk” to one of the world’s major nuclear powers. This mundane line of thinking fails to take into account China’s inability to fall inside the world’s “typical classifications,” as Yukon Huang of the Carnegie Endowment think tank so aptly put it.
“China’s financial and fiscal metrics simply do not point to a looming ‘Lehman moment,’ despite all the periodic warnings to the contrary,” Huang has argued. “China’s debt problem differs from previous crisis cases in that its debt is concentrated in the state sector rather than among private agents, and sourced domestically rather than externally. China’s current challenges may be more complex, but the financial situation in the late 1990s was more severe, and even then the difficulties proved manageable.”
China doesn’t follow the rules of the other world economies. As long as China has debt capacity, and assuming the government has no problem activating it, Trump’s trade war may not have the intended effect on China’s economy.
This is not to say that Trump’s war with China will not have adverse impacts on the Chinese economy; quite the contrary. However, overstating the effects of this strategy and empowering Trump’s hawkish position, while assuming that China does not have some dangerous tricks of its own up its sleeve as well as a backup plan, will have an equally adverse effect on the United States somewhere down the track. Perhaps that is the point all along, anyway.
Louvre Abu Dhabi postpones display of Leonardo’s Salvator Mundi
Delayed unveiling of world’s most expensive painting adds to mystery shrouding its acquisition and authenticity
September 3, 2018
by Saeed Kamali Dehghan
The Guardian
The Louvre Abu Dhabi has indefinitely postponed the unveiling of Leonardo da Vinci’s Salvator Mundi, the world’s most expensive painting which has been the subject of intense speculation over its acquisition and authenticity.
The United Arab Emirates capital’s department of culture and tourism, which was revealed as the owner of the work after an extraordinarily tense auction at Christie’s New York in November, announced on Monday in a tweet that the exhibition had been delayed.
Salvator Mundi (the saviour of the world), described by Christie’s as the biggest discovery of the 21st century, depicts Jesus Christ holding a crystal orb in his left hand while raising his right in a gesture of benediction. It broke the world record as the most expensive painting ever sold at an auction for $450.3m (£342.1m) after a 20-minute sale involving unidentified bidders.
It was scheduled to be displayed on 18 September. No reasons were given for the postponement but the Abu Dhabi-based English-language newspaper The National reported that “speculation suggests the museum might be waiting for its one-year anniversary, on November 11”.
The painting, dated to approximately 1500, is one of fewer than 20 known paintings by Leonardo. According to Christie’s, it was possibly commissioned by the French king Louis XII and his wife, but its whereabouts were unknown during the 18th and 19th centuries after it went missing from the royal family’s collection.
The painting re-emerged in 1958 and sold for $60 because it was attributed to Giovanni Boltraffio, who worked in Leonardo’s studio. But the National Gallery’s 2011 exhibition of Leonardo’s works included the Salvator Mundi, which according to Christie’s “sealed its acceptance as a fully autograph work by Leonardo da Vinci … after more than six years of painstaking research and inquiry to document the painting’s authenticity.”
The identity of the real buyer was initially unknown but later revealed to be Badr bin Abdullah bin Mohammed bin Farhan al Saud, a member of the Saudi royal family who was said to be acting on behalf of the museum in Abu Dhabi.
There has been media speculation about whether Bin Abdullah had in fact been a proxy for Saudi Arabia’s crown prince, Mohammad bin Salman, who is also close to Abu Dhabi’s powerful crown prince, Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan. A US intelligence assessment had initially identified Bin Salman as the owner but the extent of his involvement in the purchase remains unknown.
The painting’s authenticity has also been questioned. The German art historian Frank Zöllner wrote in the preface to the 2017 edition of his book, Leonardo – the Complete Paintings and Drawings, that the painting “exhibits a strongly developed sfumato technique that corresponds more closely to the manner of a Leonardo pupil active in the 1520s than to the style of the master himself”.
Martin Kemp, a Leonardo scholar who co-authored Mona Lisa: The People and the Painting, however, has said that despite “very serious damage and over-painting … there are no well-founded doubts about Leonardo’s responsibility for the picture.”
The French president, Emmanuel Macron, last year opened the new Louvre museum in the UAE after 10 years of controversy and delays. The UAE museum can carry the name “Louvre” for the next 30 years and six months in exchange for a payment to France of $525m (£407m), and an additional amount of $750m (£582m) in contract for employing French managers.
Located on Abu Dhabi’s Saadiyat Island, created in collaboration with France and designed by the star architect Jean Nouvel, the museum was the UAE’s way of challenging its regional rival Qatar’s Museum of Islamic Art in Doha, which has dominated the gulf art scene.
In March this year the Louvre also opened an unprecedented show in Tehran billed as the first large-scale exhibition by a major western museum in the country.
The French culture minister said in March that the Mona Lisa, Leonardo’s masterpiece that has spent nearly all of the past 500 years in Paris, could go on a rare tour of France.
Is Leonardo da Vinci’s Salvator Mundi fake? Is there a consensus from art scholars?
November 16, 2017
by Martin Fox, art historian
Vulture
It’s certainly not a forgery. But the Salvator Mundi that sold for $450.3 million (!) is far from universally accepted as a painting by Leonardo da Vinci. It may be by one of his students or followers.
Or it is possible that it’s by Leonardo. However, I’ll let Christie’s and most of the press make the case that the painting is by him, and present some opinions that counter this idea.
In 1900, the Salvator Mundi was acquired as a painting by Bernardino Luini, one of Leonardo’s followers. It was exhibited as a work by Leonardo in 2011, but not all Leonardo scholars agree.
There’s no contemporary record of Leonardo working on this painting, and it’s provenance (its record of ownership) is spotty at best, in my opinion.
The Salvator Mundi is heavily restored, meaning that much of what we see isn’t the original paint. That should have diminished its value significantly.
The Salvator Mundi suffered from an early stage and was subsequently repaired on a number of occasions. The original black background was replaced with green and later with a muddy brown. By 1900, when the picture was acquired by Francis Cook as by Bernardino Luini, a follower of Leonardo, it had been “grotesquely repainted”, including the addition of a beard on the face of Christ.
Frank Zöllner, the author of the catalogue raisonné ‘Leonardo da Vinci – the Complete Paintings and Drawings,’ writes that it:
“exhibits a number of weaknesses. The flesh tones of the blessing hand, for example, appear pallid and waxen as in a number of workshop paintings. Christ’s ringlets also seem to me too schematic in their execution, the larger drapery folds too undifferentiated, especially on the right-hand side. They do not begin to bear comparison with the Mona Lisa, for example….“We might sooner see the Salvator Mundi as a high-quality product of Leonardo’s workshop painted only after 1507.”
Michael Daley, the director of ArtWatch UK, who said:
There isn’t enough to claim it’s a Leonardo. His figural development was towards greater naturalism and complexity of posture – heads turning this way, shoulders turning the other way, with twists and movement. The Salvator Mundi is dead-pan flat, like an icon, with no real depth in the modelling. Another unexplained peculiarity is that the figure itself is heavily and uncharacteristically cropped.
Also, biographer Walter Issacson notes that the glass sphere doesn’t distort light as it would according to the rules of optics, which is surprising given Leonardo’s interest in observational science.
Walter Isaacson questions why an artistic genius, scientist, inventor, and engineer showed an “unusual lapse or unwillingness” to link art and science in depicting the orb.
He writes: “In one respect, it is rendered with beautiful scientific precision … But Leonardo failed to paint the distortion that would occur when looking through a solid clear orb at objects that are not touching the orb.
“Solid glass or crystal, whether shaped like an orb or a lens, produces magnified, inverted, and reversed images. Instead, Leonardo painted the orb as if it were a hollow glass bubble that does not refract or distort the light passing through it.”
He argues that if Leonardo had accurately depicted the distortions, the palm touching the orb would have remained the way he painted it, but hovering inside the orb would be a reduced and inverted mirror image of Christ’s robes and arm.
It is all the more puzzling, he notes, as Leonardo was at that time “deep into his optics studies, and how light reflects and refracts was an obsession”.
Fake Hitler items being made and sold
September 3, 2018
by Christian Jürs
I have been doing considerable research into the matter of the purported, “Adolf Hitler Ring” that was allegedly recently sold by the Alexander Auctions people for $66.000 .
On April 4, 1982, the British “Telegraph Sunday Magazine” (and later in the American “Penthouse” magazine) an article appeared on what was then called “The Treasure Trove of the Decade.”
This dealt with the purported discovery by a certain “Sergeant Joseph” in the “water-logged” basement of the “Führerbau” on the Koenigsplatz in Munich of a glittering horde of Nazi relics.
This find consisted of, among other things, “A gold-plated, richly engraved 7.65 mm pistol presented to Hitler by one ‘Max Kehl’” and now insured for $375,000, “Hitler’s ‘swastika ring’ made for him by the “leading German jeweler K. Berthlold in platinum”: a “tiny portrait of Hitler’s mother” as well as one of his dog, ‘Blondi,” and “numerous” pieces of table silver made for Hitler by the firm of Krupp in Berndorf, and Hitler’s “personal gold wristwatch” with a day-date device. This last treasure, alas, was lost when “Sergeant Joseph” was washing his hands in a public lavatory in Philadelphia.
This entire glittering collection was sold to a Mr. Ray Bily from Nevada.
In 2013, another article appeared on September 5 in ‘Mail Online’ another British publication, on the subject of the ring itself. In this article, the ring was found ‘in Hitler’s Bavarian retreat’ but there is no mention of “Sergeant Joseph,” but now the ring is stated to be of gold-plated silver, not platinum.
Since provenance is most important in establishing the authenticity of a purportedly rare items, the first step here was to ascertain the background of “Sergeant Joseph.” Most dealers who concoct stories about “Veteran finds” make up names to suit themselves but they do not realize that the U.S. Army has all of its personnel records on file in Missouri.
In checking these, we discovered four “Sergeant Joseph” names. One had been in the Pacific Theater throughout the war and therefore was not the discoverer in Munich. The other had been an Army supply sergeant in Italy from 1944 until 1945 and was not in the running. The third was killed in August of 1944 at St Lo, France and the fourth was stationed in the United States in San Antonio as a cook at the San Antonio Aviation Cadet Center.
Could the British author have made an error? Could the finder of Precious Treasures in Munich have actually have been a Sergeant Joseph Grinder?
After all Joe the Grinder was quite well known in various circles at the time.
It is interesting to note that when Mr. Craig Gottlieb recently offered an object he called “The Adolf Hitler Desk Set” for auction in the same auction house, Alexander Auctions, that presented the “Hitler Ring,” it was stated to have been found by an American soldier in the water-logged cellar of the same Führerbau in Munich! The first Gottlieb report was that the soldier had been quartered in “Eva Brauns’s Munich house” and, discovering a secret tunnel in the cellar, crawled through it for three miles, to Hitler’s earlier office in downtown Munich where he found the desk set lying on the old desk, still intact. This story was later changed to the soldier having been quartered in the “Braun Haus” that is only a few yards from the Führerbau but the secret tunnel was still in play. The only thing wrong with this scenario is that the Braun Haus had been bombed out during an earlier air raid and that quartering soldiers in it was impossible.
The ring had indeed been manufactured in Germany but was advertised in a period catalog as a “Führer” ring and at least eight were sold. A close-up picture of the Alexander Auction piece shows very bad craftsmanship, so bad that no jeweler or Party member would have dared to give it to Hitler. The tiny picture of his mother from the earlier article was copied from a Hoffman picture appearing in one of his illustrated Hitler books and the dog picture, never shown anywhere, showed a Belgian shephed dog that was black, not tan and black.
There are many collectors like Mr. Bily. They have a good deal of money, no knowledge or taste and are the delight of the dealers in such recently-manufactured glitterati as:
- The Grand Cross Papers
- The Sepp Dietrich Honor Sword
- The Goering Roman Sword
- Very bad copies of every German field marshal’s baton
- A dozen or so “genuine Junckers Grand Crosses”
- At least six “Stars for the Grand Cross”
- A plethora of fake Damascus Feldherrnhalle daggers and SS Honor daggers
- A Damascus Himmler letter opener
- Gold Mother’s medals with diamonds
- Guerrilla warfare badges in gold with diamonds
- German Crosses in gold with diamonds
- At least three PP Walther pistols, heavily engraved and purporting to be Hitler’s personal gun.
- Elaborate Knight’s Cross presentation papers for many famous German air aces, General officers, SS leading lights and U-Boat officers
- The Adolf Hitler Bearing Sword
- At least six Hitler uniform tunics, all the wrong size and with the wrong colorerd tunic buttons
- Hitler’s bunker couch
A 5-Year-Old Girl in Immigrant Detention Nearly Died of an Untreated Ruptured Appendix
September 2, 2018
by Debbie Nathan
The Intercept
The death of a Guatemalan child soon after leaving immigration detention made national news this week amid speculation that conditions in detention were responsible for her demise. It is not clear why 19-month-old Mariee Juárez became fatally ill, or if she suffered medical neglect at the South Texas Residential Center, the family detention center better known as “Dilley.” Her family alleges that Mariee became ill due to unsafe conditions and died as a result of medical neglect.
At a different South Texas detention center, another young Guatemalan child recently came down with a common illness that is easy to identify in its early stages but which can kill if not diagnosed and treated. Treatment was delayed for days, however, and the delay put the little girl’s life at risk. And less than three months before that little girl became sick, a Honduran man who spent time at the same facility died from a life-threatening illness that was not diagnosed.
The child and the man were locked up at the infamous Border Patrol detention center in McAllen, Texas, where immigrants are kept for a few days before they are transported to long-term detention centers run by Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The McAllen center is notorious for putting detainees in cage-like rooms and, during the recent “zero tolerance” period, for separating parents from their children. Immigrants know it as “the icebox” and “the dog pound.”
A one-page transport request form in the child’s case was generated by the government and sent to a hospital that later treated her, so the document ended up in her hospital records. It indicates that medical care at the McAllen facility is provided by the Division of Immigration Health Services, which is part of the U.S. Public Health Service. DIHS supplies medical staff to many long-term immigration detention facilities, including Dilley. Many ICE detention centers have been investigated for medical negligence over the past decade. But there has been little discussion of similar problems in short-term detention centers such as the one where the Honduran man died and the little girl was put at risk of death.
The Intercept attempted to obtain records of the child’s medical history while she was held at the McAllen detention facility, but was told by Customs and Border Protection and ICE that the records are obtainable only through a Freedom of Information Act request. The following account of the little girl’s medical ordeal was provided by her mother.
The Intercept will refer to the mother as Ingrid and to the child as Paulina, in order to protect the family from U.S. government reprisals and from people in Guatemala who want to hurt them.
A Determined Mother
Ingrid has three children who were 3, 5, and 8 years old when they left Guatemala in July to escape attacks against Ingrid by her severely abusive husband. She had money for only two bus tickets, so the family took turns sleeping in bus seats and on the floor. The arduous trip took almost three weeks. Even so, when they arrived in Texas in early August, everyone seemed healthy, including 5-year-old Paulina.
After they were arrested near the Rio Grande by the Border Patrol, the family was transported to the “icebox” in McAllen. It was Saturday, around noon, Ingrid remembered. They were fed half-frozen ham sandwiches on white bread, which the children found distasteful. Paulina took a bite and refused to eat more. A few hours later, she said she felt nauseous. Ingrid chalked it up to the sandwich.
But the next morning, on Sunday, Paulina’s cheeks were flushed. She had a fever, was crying, and said her whole body hurt. Ingrid asked for medical attention, and someone dressed like a doctor gave Paulina a liquid medicine and said that she felt ill simply because she was acclimating to the cold temperature inside the facility. Ingrid was told that Paulina should eat and drink water.
Two hours later, Paulina began complaining of pain in her lower right abdomen and below her belly button. By evening, Ingrid was concerned and again took Paulina for medical attention. The little girl still had abdominal pain and a fever, but the medical staffer did not lay her down on an examining table or palpate the site of the pain. Instead, Paulina got a visual evaluation while she was sitting up and clothed. Ingrid was again advised to have her daughter “drink liquids.” Paulina went back to her cell and fell asleep.
By Monday morning, she had been sick for over 40 hours and was getting worse. She was crying and saying that she needed to pee but couldn’t get to the bathroom because moving her body was too painful. Ingrid carried her, but sitting on the toilet proved so painful that the little girl could not position herself. She urinated on her clothes.
Horrified, Ingrid took Paulina once again to the medical office. Again, the staff failed to lay her down and check her abdomen. They merely took her temperature and gave her medication for fever.
For the next 23 hours, Paulina mostly slept. On Tuesday morning, she awoke and said the pain was so bad that she couldn’t breathe. Ingrid approached the guards and once again requested medical attention. In seeming disgust, a guard asked, “Now what?” Again, Paulina was not given an abdominal exam.
On Tuesday afternoon, Ingrid was told that the family was being released and would be taking a days-long bus trip to the East Coast to join a friend whom Ingrid had designated as the family’s U.S. sponsor. Ingrid could not imagine Paulina traveling in the shape she was in, but the family was put in a line with others who were being readied for transport to the bus station in McAllen. Ingrid was desperate for another medical visit for Paulina, but she was afraid the guards would again get angry if she requested one. She asked to go to the bathroom, even though her true destination was the clinic. She snuck off with Paulina in her arms.
It was now over 70 hours since Paulina had first started to feel sick, and 50 hours after she’d started complaining of abdominal pain on her lower right side. For the first time, the medical staffer laid the child down and touched her belly. The staffer then told Ingrid that medicine was being ordered for Paulina but it wouldn’t arrive for two hours. It was about 3 p.m.
By 9 p.m., the medicine still hadn’t come, and Paulina said she could no longer stand the pain. While she was talking about this to Ingrid, she suddenly passed out. Finally, a medical staffer called for an ambulance.
Paulina came into the emergency room with a fever of 103.1 degrees, serious dehydration, a pulse of 170, and abdominal pain, according to medical records. She was quickly diagnosed with a ruptured appendix and peritonitis — a potentially fatal inflammation of the tissues around the organs, caused by bacteria leaking from the appendix. Within hours, she was given an appendectomy. She received large doses of intravenous antibiotics to counteract the peritonitis, and a tube was inserted into her belly to drain the infected fluid.
“Beyond Words”
The Intercept provided Dr. Dolly Sevier, a pediatrician who practices in South Texas, with Ingrid’s chronology of Paulina’s illness while in CBP detention. Sevier also reviewed records The Intercept obtained of Paulina’s treatment in the emergency room.
Based on that information, Sevier called CBP’s medical care of Paulina “negligent.” According to her mother’s chronology, Sevier said, the little girl should have been sent to an emergency room early on Sunday, less than a day after being put into Border Patrol detention, if only because medical staff there had already noted then that the little girl was dehydrated.
Sevier said that if Paulina had been properly examined, appendicitis would have been suspected by Sunday afternoon. When an infected appendix is untreated over days, it ruptures, creating the possibility of massive internal infection that can lead to death. Sevier theorizes that Paulina’s appendix ruptured on Tuesday night, which would explain why she lost consciousness. That was 2 1/2 days after she should have first been sent to an emergency room. If Ingrid’s account is accurate, Sevier said, CBP’s negligence is “beyond words.”
Thanks to her mother’s persistence, Paulina’s appendicitis was caught and treated in time, and today she is healthy. Ronal Francisco Romero was not so lucky. The 39-year-old Honduran was apprehended by Border Patrol on May 9 while crossing into the U.S. illegally. He was taken to the agency’s processing facility in McAllen and stayed there for five days, until May 14. Then he was transferred to a nearby ICE detention center in Los Fresnos, Texas. Within a few hours of arriving there, medical staff had him transported to a nearby hospital. He was put into intensive care and died hours later.
Romero’s body has since undergone two autopsies. The Intercept obtained the second one, which notes that it agrees with the first autopsy’s finding of bacterial meningitis, a deadly infection of the brain, as the cause of death. In Romero’s case, the meningitis began with otitis media — a middle ear infection.
Romero’s mother is suing the government for negligence. According to filings by her lawyer, Andrew Free, Romero probably experienced an “agonizingly slow and excruciatingly painful death” after spending several days “intensely, visibly ill and in severe pain” in detention in McAllen. Among the signs and behaviors that fellow detainees and medical staff would have noticed, according to Free, are clamminess, discolored skin, fever, dehydration, and vomiting. It’s also likely that Romero appeared increasingly disoriented and confused. His suffering would have been immediately obvious, Free said. In fact, most people with middle ear infections that can develop into meningitis survive because they hurt so badly. The intense pain of the earache prompts them to seek care before things get bad enough to cause shock, organ failure, and death.
Free believes Romero’s illness was ignored in the McAllen detention center. He is currently trying to locate and interview staff or fellow detainees who saw Romero while he was detained. Free is also trying to get an ICE death review of the case. Such reviews are done for every person who dies or becomes fatally ill while in ICE detention, and they are supposed to be completed within 30 days after the death. Romero died on May 19, but Free has not received the death review. The Intercept requested a copy from the agency’s media department and was told to file a Freedom of Information Act request.
The Intercept contacted the U.S. Public Health Service and CBP and asked for responses to Paulina’s mother’s description of the child’s medical crisis while detained; as well as their reaction to the information in Paulina’s hospital records and to Dr. Sevier’s characterization of the little girl’s medical care in detention as negligent. We also asked for responses to the autopsy of Ronal Romero. CBP did not respond, and the U.S. Public Health Service declined to comment.
A History of Negligence
Romero’s death immediately following his stay in McAllen, and Paulina’s brush with death in the same facility, illustrate long-standing problems with medical care in immigration detention.
DIHS provides health care to detainees at about half of all immigrant detention facilities. Contract employees provide care at others. The transport document in Paulina’s hospital records indicates that the McAllen facility uses DIHS for health care.
A decade ago, the Washington Post investigated deaths of immigrants held in many such facilities and concluded that the access of these deceased to medical care had been “slow,” “shabby,” and even utterly lacking. From 2003 to 2008, the Post noted, 83 detainees died in or soon after custody — and of those deaths, more than a third might have been at least partially caused by actions taken or not taken by medical staff. Two years later, in 2010, the New York Times found similar problems.
In 2016, the American Civil Liberties Union, Detention Watch Network, and the National Immigrant Justice Center published the findings of a joint investigation into government reviews of deaths from January 2010 through May 2012. The researchers asked ICE for 24 death reviews; ICE responded with documentation for 17. Of those, it turned out, ICE had determined that noncompliance with its own medical standards contributed to or even caused eight deaths — almost half of the total.
Human Rights Watch has continued to analyze ICE detention death review cases and found the same problems as in earlier years — except they seem to be getting more prevalent. In fiscal year 2017, more people died in immigration detention than in any year since 2009.
Things may be even worse in the Border Patrol’s short-term detention facilities, such as the one in McAllen. During the 2016 investigation of ICE death reviews, ICE told the investigators that reviews are not performed when someone dies in a short-term holding facility. ICE’s response, as the investigators put it, raises the question of “whether such gaps in responsibility are endangering other lives.”
Today, almost four weeks after her surgery, Paulina is recuperating nicely and playing again with her siblings at a church-sponsored shelter in South Texas. Ingrid is waiting for a doctor to clear her daughter for travel so that the family can finally make their trip to the East Coast.
As Ingrid made plans for a new, safer life in the U.S., she remembered the early morning hours in the emergency room when she sat waiting to find out what was wrong with her gravely ill child. A hospital staffer approached and told her, in Spanish, that Paulina had just been diagnosed with a ruptured appendix.
“Tell me the truth,” Ingrid recalled the staffer berating her. “You must have seen for at least three days that she had something wrong, and it was getting worse. So tell me the truth. Why didn’t you take her to the doctor?”
“I did take her,” Ingrid answered. “I took her and took her. But we were being held by Immigration. And no one there did anything.”
Correction: September 2, 2018
A previous version of this article misspelled the last name of Andrew Free, the attorney representing Ronal Francisco Romero’s mother.