China’s slow reporting of coronavirus data frustrated WHO: report

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China’s slow reporting of coronavirus data frustrated WHO: report

Security personnel stand outside a COVID-19 field hospital in Wuhan, China on April 9, 2020 | Noel Celis/AFP via Getty Images

Controls on information and competition policies within China’s public health system were to blame, documents show.

The World Health Organization (WHO) has been frustrated with China over slow reporting of coronavirus data gathered in the country, according to an investigation conducted by the Associated Press.

Even while it was praising Beijing in public, the WHO was pressing China behind the scenes over a weeklong delay in publishing the genetic sequence of the virus, which had been decoded by three government labs, according to the report.

The AP reported that tight controls on information and competition within the Chinese public health system were to blame, according to interviews and internal documents. “For days, China didn’t release much detailed data, even as its case count exploded,” it said.

“Chinese government labs only released the genome [of the virus] after another lab published it ahead of authorities on a virologist website on January 11. Even then, China stalled for at least two weeks more on providing WHO with detailed data on patients and cases, according to recordings of internal meetings held by the U.N. health agency through January — all at a time when the outbreak arguably might have been dramatically slowed,” it said.

The findings appear to call into question claims by U.S. President Donald Trump that the WHO has been colluding with China as well as Chinese President Xi Jinping’s insistence that his country has always assisted the WHO in a constructive manner.

“The recordings suggest that rather than colluding with China … [the] WHO was kept in the dark as China gave it the minimal information required by law. However, the agency did try to portray China in the best light, likely as a means to secure more information,” the AP said.



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South Africa’s military is not suited for the fight against Covid-19. Here’s why – The Mail & Guardian

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South Africa’s military is not suited for the fight against Covid-19. Here’s why – The Mail & Guardian

The South African National Defence Force is not suited for internal deployment, particularly where it must fight “an invisible enemy” such as the coronavirus. Its conduct while enforcing the COVID-19 lockdown has brought this reality to the fore.

The military has been trained and equipped for precisely the opposite of what President Cyril Ramaphosa has asked of it – to save lives. Its purpose is to defend the country and its people against physical, external enemies – by killing such enemies if need be.

This mismatch between defence policy and practice is fundamental to understanding the circumstances around the death of Collins Khosa, allegedly at the hands of the army and police during a Covid-19 lockdown patrol.

Military affairs expert, Professor Lindy Heinecken, captures this issue in her book, South Africa’s Post-Apartheid Military: Lost in Transition and Transformation.

Chapter 3, on the South African military’s involvement in peace missions, is particularly relevant to understanding its lack of readiness to help contain Covid-19. She highlights the difficulties the military has in executing “secondary tasks”, when it’s “structured, trained, (and) funded” for warfare.

My argument that the South African military is not up to the task of fighting Covid-19 draws from research on its internal deployment and my own continuing research on the democratic nature of South Africa’s civil-military relations.

I have gained additional insights on the social and cultural impediments to nurturing the necessary humanitarian element in the military from focusing on civil-military relations over the past decade.

What are the reasons for the military’s unpreparedness? This question can be answered by giving attention to South Africa’s political and military leadership, the education and training offered to the military, and how it’s been financed.

Leadership

The responsibility for preparing any military to fight an unconventional security threat in a constitutional democracy ultimately rests with the country’s political and military leaders.

Over the past 26 years, these leaders have failed to prepare the military for secondary roles such peace missions, let alone to a fight a virus.

They have failed to create the kind of culture that allows for the alignment of what the military does and its strategic intent. South Africa’s political leaders have purposed the military largely for conventional roles, yet they deploy it mostly for unconventional tasks such as peacekeeping, fighting crime, and against Covid-19.

According to Heinecken this disconnect sits at

the heart of the challenges the military started to face in the post-apartheid era (p. 26).

Education and training

Education is another tool for transforming organisational culture, so that an organisation is better prepared to perform its role.

It was appropriate that the defence force launched a civic education programme in 1997. This was three years after the first democratic elections in the country.

It followed the amalgamation of the then South African Defence Force, the mainstay of apartheid rule, with the military forces of the nominally independent “homelands” and those of the liberation movements.

The purpose of the civic education programme was to establish compliance among members of the new defence force “with the new democratic vision of the government (and society)”. Then deputy minister of defence, Ronnie Kasrils, proclaimed:

Everyone in the SA National Defence Force, from troops to the top brass, will go back to school.

My own experience of civic education at the Oudtshoorn Infantry School in 2010, and reports on the conduct of South African soldiers on peace missions and at home, both prior to and during Covid-19, point to
the failure of the military’s civic education programme to adequately inculcate respect for human rights and dignity in the military.

In short, the education and training of South Africa’s soldiers over the past 26 years have not properly prepared them for secondary roles, such as peacekeeping or fighting new security threats like Covid-19.

It’s no surprise, therefore, that William Gumede, of the Democracy Works Foundation, a southern African non-profit company focused on the development of democracy, has called for the military’s training curriculum to be overhauled,
“to make it more human rights based”.

Finance

Military leaders can only execute their mandate, which includes education and training, to the extent that they have the necessary resources.

Over the years the military budget has been cut. In addition, almost 80% of the budget is spent on personnel. This has prompted criticism that the country’s military has become “a welfare and not a warfare agency”.

Conclusion

In truth, nothing could have fully prepared any of the world’s militaries for managing the Covid-19 pandemic. But, had South Africa’s political and military leaders done a better job of stewarding the country’s military resource over the past 26 years, it would be better prepared for the challenge.

Political leaders, in consultation with defence leaders and civil society, must engage in realistic discussion about what the military’s primary purpose should be. They may well decide to make secondary tasks the new “primary role”. They should then align its education and training with that role.

Whatever direction they choose will cost money. But, given the parlous state of South Africa’s economy, even prior to Covid-19, it’s unlikely the military budget will increase for a long time. This calls for the budget to be spent prudently, in line with the military’s core mandate.

Craig Bailie, Lecturer in Political Science (Mil), Stellenbosch University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.



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Five dead in newest Ebola outbreak in Congo, UNICEF says

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Five dead in newest Ebola outbreak in Congo, UNICEF says

“Four additional people who contracted the virus — all contacts of the deceased and including the child of one of the fatal cases — are being treated in an isolation unit at the Wangata Hospital in Mbandaka,” UNICEF said in a statement.

“The deaths occurred between the 18th and 30th of May but they were only confirmed as Ebola-related yesterday.”

Earlier Monday, World Health Organization Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus tweeted news that six cases had been reported in Mbandaka, in the country’s northwest Equateur province. It’s the country’s 11th outbreak of the potentially deadly virus, which is passed by bodily fluids and has a fatality rate of anywhere between 25% and 90%, depending on the outbreak.
The Democratic Republic of Congo is still struggling to end an outbreak that started in 2018 in the eastern part of the country, in which 3,406 cases have been reported, with 2,243 deaths, according to WHO. There has not been a new case in the past 21 days in that outbreak. Because Ebola has an incubation period of 21 days, that suggests the outbreak may be under control but WHO waits for two full incubation periods, or 42 days, to be sure before determining that an outbreak has ended.

“The announcement comes as a long, difficult and complex Ebola outbreak in eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo is in its final phase, while the country also battles COVID-19 and the world’s largest measles outbreak,” WHO said in a statement. The central African country has reported 3,195 cases of coronavirus and 72 deaths. By far the worst epidemic affecting the DRC is measles, which has infected nearly 370,000 people and killed 6,779 since 2019.

The Ebola virus lives in bats, and WHO says new outbreaks can be expected in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

By far the largest epidemic of Ebola was in 2014-2016 in the West African countries of Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea. More than 28,000 people were infected in that epidemic and more than 11,000 of them died.



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Geely’s Polestar plans China showroom expansion to compete with Tesla: sources

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Geely’s Polestar plans China showroom expansion to compete with Tesla: sources

SHANGHAI (Reuters) – Polestar, the premium electric vehicle maker owned by China’s Geely, plans a big expansion of its showroom network in the mainland, sources said, as it prepares for delivery of cars to compete with Tesla Inc’s (TSLA.O) locally made Model 3.

A worker wearing a face mask following the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) outbreak cleans the floor near a Polestar 2 electric sedan displayed at a shopping mall in Shanghai, China May 5, 2020. Picture taken May 5, 2020. REUTERS/Yilei Sun

Showroom strength is becoming an important differentiator for electric vehicle (EV) makers in the world’s biggest auto and EV market, as they line up new model launches.

Polestar, which plans to deliver Polestar 2 electric sedans in China from July, currently has one showroom, in the capital Beijing. It plans to have 20 showrooms, with most of them opening in the third quarter of this year.

Unlike sales of cars through dealers that most traditional automakers rely on, Polestar will sell directly to customers, a strategy also pursued by other EV makers including Tesla, Nio Inc (NIO.N) and Xpeng Motors, backed by Alibaba (BABA.N).

Direct sales to customers can help automakers to better manage a car’s retail price and its production and inventory. However, it also adds to costs if automakers need to invest in self-owned showrooms like Tesla.

Polestar, however, will partner with investors to build and operate the showrooms while still managing sales and delivery of cars, said the people, who spoke on condition of anonymity as the plan is not public.

A Polestar representative declined to comment.

The automaker, based in Gothenburg, Sweden, started producing Polestar 2 sedans earlier this year in China and will also export them to Europe and the United States.

It will open showrooms firstly in Shanghai and then expand to coastal Ningbo, northern Tianjin and southern Guangzhou. The showrooms will be mostly in shopping malls.

In China, Tesla has over 50 showrooms. Nio currently operates around 110 showrooms, with some of the properties belonging to partners. Xpeng plans to have over 200 outlets by the end of the year from about 150 now, many of them belonging to partners.

Reporting by Yilei Sun and Brenda Goh; Editing by Muralikumar Anantharaman

Our Standards:The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

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​‘Tell Me Who My Mother Is’: A Korean Adoptee Seeks Her Roots

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​‘Tell Me Who My Mother Is’: A Korean Adoptee Seeks Her Roots

SEOUL, South Korea — On Nov. 18, 1983, a little girl in a red silk coat was found crying in a parking lot of a market in Goesan, in central South Korea. The girl was clever enough to tell officials that she was 2 years old and that her name was Kang Mee-sook, according to her adoption papers.

Ten months later, the girl was flown to Michigan, one of the 7,900 children South Korea shipped out in 1984 for overseas adoption, mostly to the United States.

Today, that girl, renamed Kara Bos, an American citizen and mother of two, wants some answers. Armed with DNA test results, she is asking a South Korean court to rule that an 85-year-old man in Seoul​ is her biological father​ as part of her quest to meet him and ask why she was abandoned and who her mother was.

Hers is the first paternity lawsuit filed in South Korea by an overseas adoptee. A ruling in the case by the Seoul Family Court, scheduled for June 12, could set an important precedent worldwide for adoptees who are taken from their home countries, especially for the thousands of Korean adoptees abroad​ ​who have recently started returning to their birth country in search of their biological parents.

“He was and still is the only link to my mother, which was the purpose of my search,” said Ms. Bos, speaking from Amsterdam, where she has been living with her Dutch husband since 2009. “Only by filing this lawsuit could I prove he was my father and then possibly get the meeting I’d been trying to achieve for over a year.”

South Korea had never imagined lawsuits like Ms. Bos’s when it shipped out thousands of babies and toddlers annually in the 1970s and ’80s, earning the country the dubious distinction as the world’s top “baby exporter.” Hundreds of South Korean babies are still sent abroad each year. In total, more than 167,000 South Korean babies have been sent overseas for adoption since the end of the Korean War in 1953.

In recent years, many of those children​, now grown-ups, have returned to​ their birth country, including some who have been deported from the United States because their adoptive parents failed to get them American citizenship.

They campaigned for more domestic adoptions in South Korea and better protection for ​single mothers, many of whom face pressure to give up their babies because of deep social prejudices against out-of-wedlock children.

But the adoptees’ search for their roots here has never been easy. It can be stymied by poorly kept or falsified adoption papers and the fear of scandal and shame that keeps biological parents from acknowledging that they once had out-of-wedlock babies who were given away for adoption.

Local privacy laws let adoptees gain information they need to reach their biological parents, like their addresses and telephone numbers, only when the parents agree.

“We have just as much right as our parents to know the truth about our past, especially as we are adults now,” Ms. Bos said​.

The paternity lawsuit Ms. Bos filed “will be an important precedent not only for Korean adoptees abroad but also for international adoptees from other countries,” said Simone Eun Mi, a Korean adoptee who campaigns for the rights of adoptees to connect with their birth parents. “Korean adoptees are the oldest inter-country adoptees, and our accomplishments and our failures can be set as an example by adoptee communities worldwide​.”

Ms. Bos was adopted by Russell and Mariann Bedell in Sheridan, Mich., in 1984. It was not until she had her own daughter five years ago that she began thinking about the excruciating pain her Korean mother must have gone through in abandoning her, and realized how badly she wanted to reconnect with her mother.

“Two years of intensively taking care of my daughter, who was a very demanding baby in every sense of the word, brought me to the realization of what kind of bond is created in this time,” she said.

She traveled to South Korea in 2017, and visited the market where she had been abandoned in 1983, distributing leaflets in the neighborhood seeking information from anyone who might remember her. Her story has since appeared in the South Korean media, but her search went nowhere.

Then came an unexpected breakthrough.

In 2016, Ms. Bos uploaded her DNA ​data onto MyHeritage, an online genealogy platform. In January last year, after hearing about two long-lost sisters who had found each other through ​MyHeritage, she checked back into her account and learned that she had a match: a 22-year-old South Korean student at Oxford University.

When she tracked him down, he introduced Ms. Bos to one of his cousins. By then, it became apparent that the two were Ms. Bos’s nephew and niece, and that their mothers, ​who were ​​in their 50s, ​shared the same father as Ms. Bos.

​Then, she hit the wall again.

The two Koreans cut communications with Ms. Bos, as their mothers, Ms. Bos’s assumed half sisters, blocked her from contacting their father, who was identified in the South Korean court only by his last name, Oh.

Ms. Bos could not get Mr. Oh’s address. When she went to the home of one of her assumed half sisters, even pleading on her knees to let her meet their father, the family called security.

On Nov. 18, exactly 36 years after she was abandoned, Ms. Bos filed her paternity lawsuit.

The filing of the lawsuit allowed her to legally get Mr. Oh’s address, and in March, she rang the bell at his expensive apartment in Seoul. His wife answered the door. In rudimentary Korean, Ms. Bos told the woman why she was there. After a while, Mr. Oh stepped out.

“I then confronted him and asked, ‘Do you know my face?’ and asked if he knew my name, Kang Mee-sook,” she said.

The man was stoic, but “didn’t reply and just waved me away,” she said.

With that, the door was closed.

When she visited again, one of the half sisters came to the door and told her that she was trespassing and that she was not family.

But Ms. Bos convinced the court to order Mr. Oh to take a DNA test. The result came in April: It found a 99.9981 percent probability that Mr. Oh and Ms. Bos were father and daughter.

Mr. Oh could not be reached for comment. He did not have a lawyer, nor did his family represent itself during court hearings, including one held on Friday.

If Ms. Bos wins her lawsuit next week, her assumed half sisters can no longer stop her from meeting her father. But the man still cannot be forced to meet her, said her lawyer, Yang Jeong-eun.

Ms. Bos said her lawsuit would still have been worth it because it highlighted the pain and rejection Korean adoptees faced in their birth country when searching for their roots.

“Even if my father is now 85 and even because he is 85, he too should still be held accountable and provide answers to why I was abandoned and who my mother is,” she said.

Ms. Bos has also considered the possibility that her birth mother might also want to keep their past a secret.

“But to be honest, as I feel it’s a fundamental right for us as abandoned children to know our pasts, this too has to be done,” she said. “More and more of us are coming back for answers, and Korean society needs to change and allow this shame to be turned into reconciliation and forgiveness.”

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Unemployed teacher turns to music and amazes audiences

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Unemployed teacher turns to music and amazes audiences

The album is called Kaidzani Vhana and the teacher has now become a renowned self-taught guitarist, composer and songwriter.

Those who think that the late legendary Tshivenda guitar wizard, Albert Mundalamo “Mapani” Tshikundamalema of Mukula has gone to his eternal resting place with his musical talent might be deceiving themselves.

Like dynamite which comes in small packages, Tshivenda traditional music lovers will agree that Mapani’s musical spirit has resurrected itself through a rare breed of rising talent by the name of Ephraim “Galaha” Masindi of Khubvi village outside Thohoyandou in Limpopo.

Who is this teacher turned musician?

An unemployed teacher, Masindi recently dropped his debut Tshivenda traditional music album titled Kaidzani Vhana.

Asked why he opted for traditional music, Masindi was quick to respond.

“As a young man, I realised that legends who were playing Tshivenda traditional music were old people who have been passing on one after another. Pace setters like Tshivhangwaho Raedani, Simon Ranwedzi, Sarah Masindi, Eric Mukhese, Samuel Ramufhi and Ntshengedzeni Mamphodo are all gone. I felt that the music fraternity needs someone younger like me who will be able to take the spear forward. By so doing, I will be encouraging young people like myself to love, appreciate and preserve their culture. I will never divert from my tradition as long as I’m still breathing.”

Masindi’s musical journey started way back in 1996 when he used to play home-made guitar from of old oil tin and rubber bands.

“My heartfelt gratitude goes to my mother, Molly Munyai who bought me my first guitar in 1998. People started to appreciate my guitar playing skills and I started getting invitations to play in churches, weddings and other social gatherings. I have previously performed and recorded with artists like Brothers in Love, Moses Nyatheli, Albert Mudau, The Answer and Wanga Mukwevho. It is now time to realise my potential by going solo and give my fans my own good music,” he said.

About his album, Masindi said: “The album has eight tracks and is recorded at Passion Records in Gaba. I played all the guitars and did the lead vocals. All keyboards were played by Wanga ‘Best Pro’ Mukwevho. Tracks in the album include Kaidzani Vhana, I do na mvula, Dzhulu lo luma mukegulu, Phathu Wee, A i fhati mudi, O dzulaho vhudzumbamoni, Mikovhe ya tshilidzi and Nyavhumbwa wa dakaila.”

Masindi thanked all his fans, friends and colleagues in the music fraternity for giving him full support to realise his potential.

For bookings, public performance after lockdown and CD sales Masindi can be contacted on 078 513 9031. He can also be followed on his Facebook fan page.

This content has been created as part of our freelancer relief programme. We are supporting journalists and freelance writers impacted by the economic slowdown caused by #lockdownlife.

If you are a freelancer looking to contribute to The South African, read more here.



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Gallery: The best photos from around the world

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Gallery: The best photos from around the world

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Buddy the dog peers from a vehicle before the start of a movie at a drive in cinema in Snagov. Romania further loosened the measures imposed during a nationwide lockdown in order to limit the spread of the COVID-19 infections, with museums, open air restaurants, cinemas and beaches opening for public.Credit:AP

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How to Make a Dish Towel Tote Bag, With Rodarte

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How to Make a Dish Towel Tote Bag, With Rodarte

Laura and Kate Mulleavy show us how to turn kitchen towels and costume jewelry into a carry-all.

At a time when everyone is isolated at home, nervous about spending money and without an occasion to dress up, what can we do to help you pass the time?

Styles has started a series of print-and-keep D.I.Y. wardrobe customization ideas, similar to the sewing patterns that glossy magazines used to provide. We want you to remember the joy of fashion and learn (or remember) how to make things at home. Some of fashion’s best-known creative talents will be on hand to guide you through the process.

Dish towels have never seemed so important or ubiquitous as they have during these weeks of lockdown. But they are even more multipurpose than you might expect, or so say Kate and Laura Mulleavy of Rodarte. The sisters are known for their imagination and ability to find beauty in unexpected places.

“We are all stuck at home, but even if you are just hauling laundry from one room to another, it makes you feel better to be able to put stuff away in something that cheers you up,” Laura Mulleavy said. “We have so many dish towels around and are always in need of reusable totes that we can also use as storage.”

So they decided to make one out of a dish towel and some costume jewelry. Here’s how you can, too.

STEP 1

Fold your chosen dish towel in half so that the inside is on the outside.

STEP 2

Create a bottom. At the fold, measure two inches on each side, vertically. Mark and draw a line from one dot to the other. Then flatten the lower part of the folded towel so that it makes a T-shape perpendicular to the body, four inches across. This will become the “bottom” of the tote.

STEP 3

Sew each side of the flattened part together with a straight stitch half an inch from each edge so that the sides of the T are closed. This will form a V-shaped notch at the bottom of the towel. If looked at from the side, it will resemble a Y.

STEP 4

Sew each side together with a straight stitch, vertically from the bottom of the V to the upper end of the folded towel. Invert the bag and press the bottom open to make a floor.

STEP 5

Make the sides. Measure a quarter of an inch from each side seam and straight stitch vertically from the top around the bottom and up the other side to create a soft rectangular side that will turn the sac into a box shape.

STEP 6

Fold each necklace in half.

STEP 7

Cut a ribbon in four pieces, each piece four inches long. Loop each ribbon through each of the four ends in the two lengths of necklace, bringing the ends of the ribbon together.

STEP 8

Measure to the center of the upper, open rim of the bag. Then measure three and a half inches from there in either direction and mark those spots. That is where the loops, or the two ends of the handles, will go.

STEP 9

Secure the loops to the bag at two stitch points, the upper one one-eighth of an inch from the top edge of the bag, the lower one one-eighth of an inch from the bottom of the loop ribbon.

STEP 10

Put bag over your arm and go!

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The Flynn Calls: His Dismissal of Russian Interference and the Kremlin’s Savvy

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The Flynn Calls: His Dismissal of Russian Interference and the Kremlin’s Savvy

WASHINGTON — Russian spy services had just carried out a complex campaign to disrupt an American presidential election. But the man who was set to become the White House national security adviser, speaking to Russia’s ambassador, referred to that effort only as “the cyberstuff.”

The ambassador suggested that the “very deplorable” sanctions that the United States imposed on Russia in late 2016 were born out of the Obama administration’s anger about the election results, and even said that they were aimed at hurting the incoming president, Donald J. Trump. The American agreed.

In the transcripts of the phone calls between two men — Michael T. Flynn and Sergey I. Kislyak — is the kindling of a controversy that fanned into a blaze that has consumed so much of the Trump presidency.

The discussions, declassified and released on Friday, illuminate not only the Trump administration’s dismissive attitude toward overwhelming evidence of the Russian sabotage effort, but also how the Kremlin worked to manipulate Mr. Trump’s advisers by convincing them that the president’s political enemies had concocted a “Russia hoax.”

Eighteen months later, Mr. Trump stood next to President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia and said he believed Mr. Putin’s denials that the Kremlin was involved in the election sabotage. “I don’t see any reason why it would be” Russia, Mr. Trump said at a summit in Helsinki, Finland.

Mr. Flynn was not such a difficult target for a Russian manipulation effort, given his inclination to see common cause with Russia as well as his hostility toward the Obama administration. President Barack Obama had removed Mr. Flynn as the head of the Defense Intelligence Agency, and Mr. Flynn famously led a chorus of “lock her up” chants at the 2016 Republican National Convention in a reference to Hillary Clinton.

During the presidential campaign, Mr. Trump had spoken frequently about wanting to improve American relations with Russia.

Mr. Kislyak “played Flynn like a fiddle, particularly when Flynn astonishingly suggested that the U.S. and Russia should ratchet down tensions” after the United States punished Russia for its election interference, said Marc Polymeropoulos, who once oversaw the C.I.A.’s clandestine operations in Europe and Eurasia.

For a former head of an intelligence agency, he said, Mr. Flynn “showed a stunning lack of counterintelligence savvy or sophistication in dealing with an adversary” that, Mr. Polymeropoulos said, is “never to be trusted and who operates under the concept of a ‘zero sum game.’”

In justifying his decision to drop charges against Mr. Flynn for lying to the F.B.I. about what transpired during the Kislyak calls, Attorney General William P. Barr called the conversations “laudable,” saying that Mr. Flynn was trying to keep Russia from escalating tensions with the United States.

During an interview with CBS News last month, Mr. Barr said that it was “very common” for the incoming national security team to communicate with foreign leaders and that Mr. Flynn said “nothing inconsistent with the Obama administration’s policies.”

But during one of the conversations with the Russian ambassador, Mr. Flynn indicated he saw the Kremlin as more of an ally than the departing American president. “Do not let this administration box us in right now,” he said to Mr. Kislyak.

Mr. Flynn had long seen Russia as a partner in combating terrorism. During the calls, Mr. Kislyak appealed to the instincts of Mr. Flynn, a former general who had spent years in Afghanistan and Iraq consumed with a singular mission — hunting and killing militant suspects and trying to dismantle terrorist networks.

During one call, Mr. Kislyak said he was puzzled by the Obama administration’s decision to punish Russia’s leading spy services for their involvement in the election interference. Earlier that day, Mr. Obama had announced penalties against Russia, including economic sanctions, the expulsion of 35 suspected Russian spies operating under diplomatic cover and the closing of two Russian diplomatic compounds in the United States.

These are the very spy agencies that are central to Russia’s fight against terrorism, the Russian ambassador said.

“I ask myself, does it mean that the United States isn’t willing to work on terrorist threats?”

Mr. Flynn agreed, omitting any mention of the spy services’ operations to undermine American democracy.

By that point, Mr. Kislyak had become a fixture of Washington diplomacy, throwing lavish dinner parties at his mansion near the White House and making frequent appearances at think tanks to defend Russia’s adventurous foreign policy. With a background in arms control negotiations, Mr. Kislyak was a savvy operator who had spent years as Mr. Putin’s trusted man in Washington.

At the time of the calls, Mr. Flynn and other Trump campaign advisers were being investigated by the F.B.I. for their contacts with Russian officials. Nothing on the calls with Mr. Kislyak — and no evidence unearthed in the past three years — suggests that Mr. Flynn ever worked as an agent on behalf of Russia.

Mr. Flynn’s supporters say there was no reason for F.B.I. agents to interview the former Army general in January 2017 since the investigation was on the verge of closing, which is also now the Justice Department’s position.

But the phone calls with Mr. Kislyak, along with the fact that Mr. Flynn lied to several White House officials about what happened during the discussions, caused enough concern in the F.B.I. that its director at the time, James B. Comey, sent agents to the White House to question Mr. Flynn. He pleaded guilty later that year to lying during the interview.

The president and his allies now accuse the F.B.I. of framing Mr. Flynn. This is part of Mr. Trump’s larger campaign to paint the bureau’s Russia inquiry — later run by the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III — as a “witch hunt” devised to discredit the president’s 2016 election victory and hurt his chances of being re-elected.

Mr. Trump’s dismissal of Russia’s intervention in 2016 to help get him elected has been a leitmotif of his administration, even in the face of a mountain of evidence unearthed by American intelligence and law enforcement agencies of a campaign to hack and leak Democratic emails, spread false information on social media platforms and use cutouts to make contact with Mr. Trump’s advisers.

Mr. Mueller began his report with a blunt statement of fact: “The Russian government interfered in the 2016 presidential election in sweeping and systematic fashion.”

Rolf Mowatt-Larssen, a former head of European operations and Moscow station chief at the C.I.A., said it was important to think of the situation from the Russian perspective. “Flynn is the prospective national security adviser,” he said. “He has reached out, presumably with Trump’s blessing, to reassure Vladimir Putin personally that U.S.-Russian relations will be fundamentally different.”

Besides his passing mention of “the cyberstuff,” Mr. Flynn never brought up the Russian sabotage campaign with Mr. Kislyak, according to the transcripts. The United States and Russia were not enemies, he said, and both countries needed to focus on a common threat — terrorism.

“We have to take these enemies on that we have,” Mr. Flynn said. “And we definitely have a common enemy. You have a problem with it, we have a problem with it in this country and we definitely have a problem with it in the Middle East.”

In the future national security adviser, the Russian ambassador had found a sympathetic ear.

“General, I completely agree with you,” he said.

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Ready to Sell? Here’s How to Refresh Your Home During Lockdown

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Ready to Sell? Here’s How to Refresh Your Home During Lockdown

A fresh coat of white paint is a relatively inexpensive improvement that can substantially enhance the look of a home, and one that many homeowners can do on their own.

Refinishing wood floors can be a pain, but if the home is empty, it may be worthwhile. Or maybe not: The 2019 Remodeling Impact Report prepared by the National Association of Realtors and the National Association of the Remodeling Industry estimated the average floor-refinishing job was a financial wash — a $2,600 job could potentially boost the sale price by the same amount.

The value of kitchen and bathroom renovations is far less certain. Sellers might recoup only $20,000 of an average $38,300 kitchen upgrade, the associations estimated, and $20,000 of a $35,000 bathroom renovation.

Of course, some kitchen and bathroom renovations are more appealing than others. Renovations completed by Curbio, Mr. Rudman said, regularly earn more than they cost. That’s because his contractors focus on using simple, inexpensive materials that will appeal to the broadest group of buyers possible, he said — like white subway tile and white Shaker-style cabinets.

“It’s stuff that may not be somebody’s dream kitchen or dream bathroom,” he said. “But what they do say is, ‘Hey, I can live here for three, four or five years, and I don’t have to do anything.’”

Homes with extremely outdated, unappealing kitchens and bathrooms stand to benefit the most from such renovations. So if your kitchen and bathrooms are generally acceptable, focus on cleaning and decluttering instead.

“If you want to get the best price and attract the most buyers,” Mr. Rudman said, “you want it to look fresh, modern and move-in ready.”

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