Tag Archives: Compensate

US

Arizona judge orders Kari Lake to compensate Katie Hobbs for some fees for election lawsuit, but declines to sanction her

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CNN
 — 

A Maricopa County judge on Tuesday ordered Arizona Republican Kari Lake to compensate Democratic Gov.-elect Katie Hobbs for some legal fees related to the election lawsuit Lake had brought challenging her loss, but he stopped short of sanctioning Lake for filing the lawsuit.

Judge Peter Thompson had rejected Lake’s lawsuit on Saturday, concluding that there wasn’t clear or convincing evidence of misconduct and affirming Hobbs’ victory. That Christmas Eve ruling was a major defeat for Lake, who lost to Hobbs by about 17,000 votes in November and sued in an effort to overturn the election.

Attorneys for Hobbs – the current secretary of state – had charged that Lake and her lawyers knew their challenges to the election could not be substantiated, which would violate legal ethic rules. They wanted sanctions against Lake and her team. Thompson did not agree. “The Court finds that Plaintiff’s claims presented in this litigation were not groundless and brought in bad faith,” he wrote on Tuesday.

But he ordered Lake to pay Hobbs $33,040.50 in compensation for expert witness fees and again reaffirmed the election of Hobbs, who will be sworn in on January 5.

The recent rulings are the latest rebuke to election deniers nationwide and harken back to the long stream of legal losses former President Donald Trump suffered in 2020 as he sought to challenge his election loss. Maricopa County, which spans the Phoenix area and houses a majority of Arizona’s population, was a hotbed of unfounded allegations of fraud in the midterms and 2020 election.

In a tweet after the Saturday ruling, Lake, who sat in the courtroom during the trial but did not testify, said she would appeal the decision “for the sake of restoring faith and honesty in our elections.”

A former Arizona television journalist, Lake built her campaign around her support for Trump’s lies about widespread election fraud in the 2020 presidential election. She had since doubled down, falsely claiming she won the 2022 election.

Thompson had previously dismissed eight counts alleged in Lake’s lawsuit prior to trial, ruling that they did not constitute proper grounds for an election contest under Arizona law, even if true. But he had permitted Lake an attempt to prove at a two-day trial last week two other counts involving printers and the ballot chain of custody in Maricopa County.

According to Thompson’s Saturday ruling, Lake’s team had to show that someone intentionally caused the county’s ballot-on-demand printers to malfunction – and as a result of that, enough “identifiable” votes were lost to change the outcome of the election.

“Every single witness before the Court disclaimed any personal knowledge of such misconduct. The Court cannot accept speculation or conjecture in place of clear and convincing evidence,” Thompson wrote.

This story has been updated with additional information.

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Health

Exercise can’t compensate for a poor diet, study says

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SYDNEY, Australia — Exercise alone won’t compensate for a poor diet, according to researchers from the University of Sydney. Even if you spend all day and night in the gym or running laps, you’re still better off steering clear of fatty, processed foods. Researchers conclude that high levels of physical activity do not counteract the detrimental effects of a poor diet on mortality risk.

Study authors add individuals who both exercised frequently and stuck to a healthy diet displayed the lowest mortality risks. In other words, that’s the way to go!

The team examined the independent and combined effects of diet and physical activity on all-cause, cardiovascular disease, and cancer mortality risk among a large collection of British adults (360,600). That data was provided by the UK Biobank Project, an ongoing, large-scale biomedical study monitoring participants’ biological, behavioral, and health fluctuations over time.

What does ‘eating healthy’ look like?

For the purposes of this study, researchers defined a high-quality diet as anything including at least five portions of fruit and vegetables daily, two portions of fish weekly, and an overall low consumption of red and processed meats.

In comparison to those who were either inactive and following a poor diet, people who exercised regularly and ate a healthy diet displayed a 17-percent lower all-cause mortality risk, a 19-percent lower cardiovascular disease mortality risk, and a 27-percent lower mortality risk associated with certain cancers.

“Both regular physical activity and a healthy diet play an important role in promoting health and longevity,” says lead study author Associate Professor Melody Ding from the Charles Perkins Centre and the Faculty of Medicine and Health in a university release. “Some people may think they could offset the impacts of a poor diet with high levels of exercise or offset the impacts of low physical activity with a high-quality diet, but the data shows that unfortunately this is not the case.”

“Adhering to both a quality diet and sufficient physical activity is important for optimally reducing the risk of death from all causes, cardiovascular disease and cancers,” adds study co-author Joe Van Buskirk, from the School of Public Health, Faculty of Medicine and Health.

While earlier projects suggest intense exercise may help defend against detrimental physiological responses to overeating, the Australian team says the long-term nature of how diet and exercise interact with each other to dictate health outcomes remains woefully understudied. This work, at least, confirms the importance of exercise and quality diet in relation to all-cause and cause-specific risks of death.

“This study reinforces the importance of both physical activity and diet quality for achieving the greatest reduction in mortality risk,” Prof. Ding concludes. “Public health messages and clinical advice should focus on promoting both physical activity and dietary guidelines to promote healthy longevity.”

The study is published in the British Journal of Sports Medicine.



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World

U.S. to compensate some ‘Havana syndrome’ victims with six-figure payments

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The Biden administration plans to pay some diplomats and intelligence officers roughly $100,000 to $200,000 each to compensate for the mysterious health problems known as “Havana syndrome,” according to congressional aides and a former official familiar with the matter.

The payment plan is the culmination of a multiyear push by Congress, which passed a law last fall mandating that the State Department and CIA compensate current and former officials suffering from what the government calls Anomalous Health Incidents, or AHIs.

Despite six years of investigations, the United States still lacks certainty about what is causing the symptoms, which include headaches, vision problems, dizziness and brain fog, among other ailments. The health problems were first reported among U.S. diplomats and intelligence officers serving in Cuba’s capital but have since been reported on every continent except Antarctica.

The six-figure payments will go to those determined to have suffered the most significant setbacks, such as job loss or career derailment, said people briefed on the plan who like others spoke on the condition of anonymity because the plan has not been approved for release.

U.S. officials cautioned that the range of compensation is not yet final and could change as the State Department’s regulation goes through the final stages of a review process, which is coordinated by the Office of Management and Budget.

The CIA determined this winter that a foreign country is probably not behind a “worldwide campaign harming U.S. personnel with a weapon or mechanism” — an assessment that raised doubts about years of speculation that the health issues were the result of a mysterious directed energy weapon wielded by Russian or Chinese agents.

Government investigators have reviewed more than 1,000 cases, with the majority being attributed to a preexisting medical condition or environmental or other factors. Dozens of other reported cases remain unexplained.

As word of the compensation packages has trickled out to the federal workforce, some officials have remarked that the packages were generous while others have said the compensation range seems insufficient, given the loss of future and past income for those who suffered severe neurological damage and can no longer work.

The Biden administration has not yet released the criteria for how it will determine eligibility for compensation, but it is expected to be made public shortly. Current and former officials as well as their family members will be eligible to make claims, said those briefed on the plan.

Under the Havana Act, Congress gave the secretary of state and CIA director the authority to determine eligibility, which has already caused concerns about whether diplomats and intelligence officers will be treated the same.

“It is crucial that CIA and State implement the Havana Act in an identical fashion. To include using the exact same criteria who qualifies for compensation. There cannot be any daylight between agencies, which previously was an unfortunate hallmark in how the USG responded to the AHIs,” said Marc Polymeropoulos, a former senior CIA officer. He retired in 2019 while suffering symptoms, including painful headaches, after a trip to Moscow in 2017, when he was helping run clandestine operations in Russia.

Devising a compensation plan has been particularly difficult for U.S. government officials, given the lack of hard evidence for what’s causing the ailments and the inability to establish a clear diagnosis for the broad range of symptoms that while sometimes debilitating can also be common.

Officials with the State Department and CIA said Thursday that the Havana Act authorized the agencies to provide payments to personnel for “qualifying injuries to the brain.”

The two agencies have been working in partnership with the National Security Council on how the payment system will work and will have more information on it soon, the CIA official said.

The official added that the legislation provides the CIA and other agencies “the authority to make payments to employees, eligible family members, and other individuals affiliated with the CIA.”

“As Director Burns has emphasized, nothing is more important to him and CIA leaders than taking care of our people,” the official said, referencing CIA Director William J. Burns.

Officials from the National Institutes of Health, the Pentagon and other agencies have jointly developed a new, two-hour medical exam to screen potential new cases that can be administered by doctors or other practitioners to U.S. personnel assigned to overseas missions.

The triage process includes visual, vestibular and blood testing but not brain imaging, a fact that reflects constantly changing and sometimes-disputed science on the injuries. Even though some doctors previously identified “perceptible changes” in the brain as a result of apparent attacks, State Department physicians say they now believe the scans have no scientific validity.

Officials are also seeking to better educate medical staffers at missions worldwide, instructing them to be receptive to potential victims’ experiences — and they stress that skepticism is no longer the norm.

In January, Secretary of State Antony Blinken said the State Department, like the CIA, was focused on providing medical care to those needing it, and would continue to seek a cause behind the health issues.

“We are going to continue to bring all of our resources to bear in learning more about these incidents, and there will be additional reports to follow. We will leave no stone unturned,” he wrote.

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World

French Catholic Church Will Sell Assets to Compensate Abuse Victims

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PARIS — The Roman Catholic Church in France will sell some of its assets to compensate victims of sexual abuse, French bishops announced on Monday, one month after the release of a sweeping report on sexual abuse by the clergy that has fueled growing calls for reform.

“We will ensure that no one is left behind,” Éric de Moulins-Beaufort, the archbishop of Reims and the president of the Bishops’ Conference of France, told reporters after a meeting of bishops over the past week in Lourdes, a popular Catholic pilgrimage site in southwestern France.

The measure, one of several approved near unanimously on Monday by the bishops, was greeted by victims groups as a significant step in the French church’s reckoning of sexual abuse in its ranks, which accelerated after the release of the report last month.

But they cautioned that they would keep a watchful eye on the implementation of the measures announced Monday, which also included the creation of an independent reparations body to process victims’ claims. The bishops also said they planned to set up working groups, presided over by laypeople, that will draw up concrete proposals by 2023 on issues like the training of priests.

Olivier Savignac, a member of De la parole aux actes!, an umbrella association of victim groups established after the report was released, said that a culture of opaqueness and secrecy had been “broken.”

“Now we want to see how things are going to be implemented,” Mr. Savignac said, citing the staffing of the working groups and of the reparations body, which will be led by Marie Derain de Vaucresson, a legal expert who specializes in the rights of children.

The devastating church-ordered report last month estimated that 200,000 to 300,000 children or vulnerable people had been abused over the past 70 years by clergy members or people affiliated with the church — a projection based on a general population survey, a public call for victims’ testimony, archival analysis and other sources.

For the first time last week, France’s 120 bishops recognized that the church bore an “institutional responsibility” for “systemic” abuse.

“It’s the sign of a positive dynamic, which must still be confirmed,” Jérôme Chapuis, the editor in chief of La Croix, a respected Catholic newspaper in France, wrote in an editorial on Sunday. “Because this fragile process is only in its early stages.”

The announcement on compensation was widely awaited by victims of clerical abuse, who had balked at earlier suggestions by France’s Catholic leadership that the victims compensation fund should be financed mainly by parishioner donations.

“It’s what we were hoping for,” said Mr. Savignac, who was sexually abused by a priest at age 13. “Because it’s the institution that is taking responsibility and paying.”

The Church will sell assets, including real estate, and could even take out a loan if needed, Archbishop de Moulins-Beaufort said. Each victim will also be compensated individually — another key demand from victims groups, who had rejected suggestions of a flat fee and said each case needed to be evaluated separately. Some victims say they need to recoup years of medical bills and other expenses linked to the trauma caused by the abuse.

Parishioners can still donate money directly to the compensation fund, but general parishioner donations, which account for a large portion of the Catholic Church’s funding in France, will not be used, the bishops said on Monday.

Archbishop de Moulins-Beaufort did not provide any details about how much the church expected that the compensation fund would grow, but said it would be endowed gradually as victims came forward. Nor did he provide an inventory of what the church expected to sell. Some French dioceses, like the one in Paris, have sizable real estate assets, but others are struggling financially.

“Obviously we must gather sums that are far greater than what we had imagined, given the scope of the abuse,” he said.

The bishops have also asked Pope Francis to send a team of “trusted” advisers to help evaluate the French church’s child-protection measures. The Vatican’s role in the handling of abuse scandals in the Catholic Church has been criticized by victims’ groups, who argue that it is an obstacle to reform on some issues, like holding negligent bishops accountable, requiring that allegations be reported to civil authorities, and, in rare cases, using confession to keep abuse secret.

The bishops voted on Monday to create a special canonical court that will handle abuse cases nationwide, to avoid having priests accused of abuse judged by local church leaders who may be inclined to protect them.

But other issues related to canon law are outside of the French church’s purview and would require a policy shift in Rome. French Catholic leaders are expected to meet with Pope Francis in December.

“We are not at the end of the path,” Archbishop de Moulins-Beaufort said in his closing speech on Monday. “But a path is possible, it has been laid out for us, and we must follow it step by step.”

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Technology

Apple Reportedly Increasing iPhone 13 Prices to Compensate for Increased Chip Production Cost

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Apple is reportedly planning to increase the price of the upcoming iPhone 13 series as a way to compensate for the increased costs of chip production from its leading chip supplier TSMC, according to a report from DigiTimes.

According to the report, TSMC is planning to increase the costs of its chip production, impacting several customers, including Apple. TSMC is reportedly looking to increase its costs by as much as 20% for its “advanced and mature process technologies.” The new changes are expected to go into effect in January.

TSMC has reportedly notified customers of price increases by as much as 20% for its advanced and mature process technologies, with the new prices set to be effective starting January 2022. The price adjustments will also be for the orders scheduled to be fulfilled starting December.

For TSMC’s advanced sub-7nm process technologies, quotes will rise by 3-10%, the sources indicated. Apple, the biggest client of TSMC with its orders accounting for over 20% of the foundry’s total wafer revenue, will experience a 3-5% price hike, the sources said.

As a way to compensate for the increase of the costs, Apple is reportedly eyeing to increase the costs of the upcoming ‌iPhone 13‌ series to “mitigate the impact of rising costs on their profitability.”

While facing rising production costs, brand vendors may end up passing the costs onto end-market customers, the observers said.

Apple is likely to set higher prices for its upcoming iPhone and other series, according to market sources. Multiple notebook brand vendors, which have raised their prices by 5-10% so far this year, continue to explore ways to mitigate the impact of rising costs on their profitability.

Apple this year is preparing some considerable improvements for the ‌iPhone 13‌, including features specifically designed for professional photographers and videographers. On the higher-end models of the upcoming lineup, Apple is rumored to be adding support for ProRes for videos and portrait mode videos. Apple may see both of these features as justification for an increase in price on its most premium iPhones.

Apple is expected to hold an all-digital event which will include the announcement of the ‌iPhone 13‌ and Apple Watch Series 7 in just a few weeks. To catch up on everything we know about the upcoming iPhones, be sure to check out our comprehnsive guide.

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Business

Didi Global Considers Going Private to Placate China and Compensate Investors

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HONG KONG—Ride-hailing giant Didi Global Inc. is considering going private in order to placate authorities in China and compensate investors for losses incurred since the company listed in the U.S. in late June, according to people familiar with the matter.

The Beijing-headquartered company has been in discussions with bankers, regulators and key investors about how it could resolve some of the problems that emerged after Didi listed on the New York Stock Exchange on June 30, the people said. A take-private deal that would involve a tender offer for its publicly traded shares is one of the preliminary options being considered, they added.

Didi raised about $4.4 billion in its initial public offering after selling American depositary shares at $14 apiece, in the biggest stock sale by a Chinese company since the 2014 blockbuster listing of Alibaba Group Holding Ltd.

Its shares briefly topped $18 in their first days of trading, before the Cyberspace Administration of China stunned investors and the company on July 2 by launching a data-security probe into Didi and blocking its China business from adding new users. Two days later, the cybersecurity regulator told app-store operators to take down the company’s popular Chinese mobile app.

The crackdown worsened on July 9, when 25 more Didi apps—including ones used by drivers—were ordered to be removed from app stores, potentially crippling the company’s operations. China also said in early July that it would tighten rules for companies selling shares abroad, signaling its displeasure with recent listings by Didi and others.

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