Tag Archives: government organizations – us

Business

Elon Musk meets with House Speaker Kevin McCarthy and Hakeem Jeffries

Leave a comment



CNN
 — 

Twitter and Tesla CEO Elon Musk met with House Speaker Kevin McCarthy and Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries at the US Capitol in Washington on Thursday evening.

McCarthy, leaving the meeting with Musk in his office, declined to comment other than to say: “He came for my birthday.” The California Republican turned 58 on Thursday.

After the meeting, Musk wrote on Twitter that he met with McCarthy and Jeffries “to discuss ensuring that this platform is fair to both parties.”

The meeting between Musk and congressional leaders comes as the House Oversight Committee is planning to hold a hearing next month focused on Twitter and how it handled a story about Hunter Biden’s laptop. The House GOP conference members have promised rigorous oversight into big tech and social media platforms, which they have accused of conservative censorship.

The panel invited three former Twitter employees to testify, and is in active discussions with the trio about appearing in front of the committee, according to multiple sources familiar with the matter. The committee is looking at February 8 as a potential target date for the hearing, the sources said.

The manner in which Twitter handled the Hunter Biden laptop story has been the subject of several so-called Twitter Files reports, corporate communications that have been disseminated to journalists hand-picked by Musk and his team at Twitter. The Twitter Files have shown the company’s moderation team agonized over how to handle initial stories about the saga. Although early news reports were blocked or downplayed, the company quickly reversed course and allowed them to be posted and discussed on the platform.

Musk has developed a reputation as a polarizing figure in the tech industry and for his political views. He has frequently weighed in publicly on US policy and the political landscape in recent months. Musk has said that he has voted for Democrats and Republicans in the past but has recently favored conservatives and says he identifies as Republican.

The meeting comes amid a political power shift in Washington after Republicans took control of the House of Representatives in January and elected McCarthy as speaker.

This story and headline have been updated with additional developments.

Read original article here

World

Wagner group: US introduces new sanctions targeting Russian mercenary group

Leave a comment



CNN
 — 

The US Treasury Department on Thursday designated the Wagner Group, a Russian private mercenary organization heavily involved in the war in Ukraine, as a significant transnational criminal organization, and imposed a slew of sanctions on a transnational network that supports it.

The US Department of State concurrently announced a number of sanctions meant to “target a range of Wagner’s key infrastructure – including an aviation firm used by Wagner, a Wagner propaganda organization, and Wagner front companies,” according to US Secretary of State Antony Blinken.

“As Russia’s military has struggled on the battlefield, Putin has resorted to relying on the Wagner Group to continue his war of choice. The Wagner Group has also meddled and destabilized countries in Africa, committing widespread human rights abuses and extorting natural resources from their people,” the Treasury Department said in a press release.

In addition to the measures targeting the Wagner Group – which were previewed by the White House last week – both agencies announced sanctions against a wide group of individuals and companies tied to Russia’s war in Ukraine. They are the latest US punitive measures against the Kremlin and its proxies as Russian President Vladimir Putin’s war approaches its second year with no signs of abating.

“This action supports our goal to degrade Moscow’s capacity to wage war against Ukraine, to promote accountability for those responsible for Russia’s war of aggression and associated abuses, and to place further pressure on Russia’s defense sector,” Blinken said in a statement.

The Treasury Department announced sanctions on a number of individuals and companies tied to Moscow’s defense industrial complex, as well as Putin allies and their family members, and two people involved with Russia’s attempts to annex parts of Ukraine.

The State Department also announced sanctions on “three individuals for their roles as heads of the Russian Federal Penitentiary Service, which has been reported to facilitate the recruitment of Russian prisoners into the Wagner Group,” a Deputy Prime Minister who also serves as the Minister of Industry and Trade,” “the Chairman of the Election Commission of the Rostov Region,” a network tied to an already-sanctioned Russian oligarch, and a financier to Putin, according to Blinken.

In addition, the State Department announced it will take steps to impose visa restrictions “on 531 members of the Russian Federation military for actions that threaten or violate the sovereignty, territorial integrity, or political independence of Ukraine.”

National Security Council Coordinator for Strategic Communications John Kirby last week previewed the significant transnational criminal organization designation and forthcoming sanctions against the Wagner group, telling reporters Friday, “These actions recognize the transcontinental threat that Wagner poses, including through its ongoing pattern of serious criminal activity.”

Among the companies sanctioned by the Treasury Department for their ties to the Wagner Group and its leader, Yevgeniy Prigozhin, are Joint Stock Company Terra Tech, a “Russia-based technology firm that supplies space imagery acquired by commercially active satellites, as well as aerial images acquired by unmanned systems,” and a China-based entity “that has provided Terra Tech synthetic aperture radar satellite imagery orders over locations in Ukraine.”

“These images were gathered in order to enable Wagner combat operations in Ukraine,” the Treasury Department said.

In addition to sanctions related to the Wagner Group’s significant involvement in the war in Ukraine, the Treasury Department imposed sanctions for its illicit activities in the Central African Republic. The group was re-designated “for being responsible for or complicit in, or having engaged in, the targeting of women, children, or any civilians through the commission of acts of violence, or abduction, forced displacement, or attacks on schools, hospitals, religious sites, or locations where civilians are seeking refuge, or through conduct that would constitute a serious abuse or violation of human rights or a violation of international humanitarian law in relation to the CAR.”

Read original article here

World

FBI seizes website used by notorious ransomware gang

Leave a comment



CNN
 — 

The FBI has seized the computer infrastructure used by a notorious ransomware gang which has extorted more than $100 million from hospitals, schools and other victims around the world, US officials announced Thursday.

FBI officials since July have had extraordinary access to the so-called Hive ransomware group’s computer networks, FBI Director Christopher Wray said at a news conference, allowing the bureau to pass computer “keys” to victims so that they could decrypt their systems and thwart $130 million in ransom payments.

As of November, Hive ransomware had been used to extort about $100 million from over 1,300 companies worldwide – many of them in health care, according to US officials.

The dark-web website on which Hive listed its victims displayed a message in Russian and English Thursday that it had been taken over “as part of a coordinated law enforcement action” against the group by the FBI, Secret Service and numerous European government agencies.

“Simply put, using lawful means, we hacked the hackers,” Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco told reporters.

The Hive ransomware has been particularly rampant in the health care sector. One ransomware attack using Hive malicious software, in August 2021, forced a hospital in the US Midwest to turn away patients as Covid-19 surged, Attorney General Merrick Garland said.

Other reported US victim organizations of Hive include a 314-bed hospital in Louisiana. The hospital said it thwarted a ransomware attack in October, but that the hackers still stole personal data on nearly 270,000 patients.

“Hive compromised the safety and health of patients in hospitals – who are among our most vulnerable population,” said Errol Weiss, chief security officer for the Health Information Sharing and Analysis Center, a cyber threat sharing group for big health care providers worldwide. “When hospitals are attacked and medical systems go down, people can die.”

Thursday’s announcement is the latest in a series of Justice Department efforts to crack down on overseas ransomware groups that lock up US companies’ computers, disrupt their operations and demand millions of dollars to unlock the systems. Justice officials have seized millions of dollars in ransomware payments and urged companies not to pay off the criminals.

The ransomware epidemic grew more urgent for US officials after Colonial Pipeline, the major pipeline operator for sending fuel to the East Coast, shut down for days in May 2021 due to a ransomware attack from a suspected Russian cybercriminal. The disruption led to long lines at gas stations in multiple states as people hoarded fuel.

While the ransomware economy remains lucrative, there are signs that the US and international law enforcement stings are making a dent in the hackers’ earnings. Ransomware revenue fell to about $457 million in 2022, down from $766 million in 2021, according to data from cryptocurrency-tracking firm Chainalysis.

Cybersecurity professionals welcomed the Hive takedown, but some worried that another group would soon fill the void left by Hive.

“The disruption of the Hive service won’t cause a serious drop in overall ransomware activity but it is a blow to a dangerous group that has endangered lives by attacking the healthcare system,” John Hultquist, a vice president at Google-owned cybersecurity firm Mandiant, told CNN.

“Unfortunately, the criminal marketplace at the heart of the ransomware problem ensures a Hive competitor will be standing by to offer a similar service in their absence, but they may think twice before allowing their ransomware to be used to target hospitals,” Hultquist said.

Wray said the FBI would continue to track the people behind Hive ransomware and try to arrest them. It was not immediately clear where those people were located. The Department of Health and Human Services has descried Hive as a “possibly Russian speaking” group.

This story has been updated with additional details.

Read original article here

US

First on CNN: Classified documents found at Pence’s Indiana home

Leave a comment


Washington
CNN
 — 

A lawyer for former Vice President Mike Pence discovered about a dozen documents marked as classified at Pence’s Indiana home last week, and he has turned those classified records over to the FBI, multiple sources familiar with the matter told CNN.

The FBI and the Justice Department’s National Security Division have launched a review of the documents and how they ended up in Pence’s house in Indiana.

The classified documents were discovered at Pence’s new home in Carmel, Indiana, by a lawyer for Pence in the wake of the revelations about classified material discovered in President Joe Biden’s private office and residence, the sources said. The discovery comes after Pence has repeatedly said he did not have any classified documents in his possession.

It is not yet clear what the documents are related to or their level of sensitivity or classification.

Pence’s team notified congressional leaders and relevant committees of the discovery on Tuesday.

Pence asked his lawyer to conduct the search of his home out of an abundance of caution, and the attorney began going through four boxes stored at Pence’s house last week, finding a small number of documents with classified markings, the sources said.

Pence’s lawyer immediately alerted the National Archives, the sources said. In turn, the Archives informed the Justice Department.

A lawyer for Pence told CNN that the FBI requested to pick up the documents with classified markings that evening, and Pence agreed. Agents from the FBI’s field office in Indianapolis picked up the documents from Pence’s home, the lawyer said.

On Monday, Pence’s legal team drove the boxes back to Washington, DC, and handed them over to the Archives to review the rest of the material for compliance with the Presidential Records Act.

In a letter to the National Archives obtained by CNN, Pence’s representative to the Archives Greg Jacob wrote that a “small number of documents bearing classified markings” were inadvertently boxed and transported to the vice president’s home.

“Vice President Pence was unaware of the existence of sensitive or classified documents at his personal residence,” Jacob wrote. “Vice President Pence understands the high importance of protecting sensitive and classified information and stands ready and willing to cooperate fully with the National Archives and any appropriate inquiry.”

The classified material was stored in boxes that first went to Pence’s temporary home in Virginia before they were moved to Indiana, according to the sources. The boxes were not in a secure area, but they were taped up and were not believed to have been opened since they were packed, according to Pence’s attorney. Once the classified documents were discovered, the sources said they were placed inside a safe located in the house.

Pence’s Washington, DC, advocacy group office was also searched, Pence’s lawyer said, and no classified material or other records covered by the Presidential Records Act was discovered.

The news about Pence come as special counsels investigate the handling of classified documents by both Biden and former President Donald Trump. The revelations also come amid speculation that Pence is readying for a run at the Republican nomination for president in 2024.

Since the FBI searched Trump’s home in Florida for classified material in August with a search warrant, Pence has said that he had not retained any classified material upon leaving office. “No, not to my knowledge,” he told The Associated Press in August.

In November, Pence was asked by ABC News at his Indiana home whether he had taken any classified documents from the White House.

“I did not,” Pence responded.

“Well, there’d be no reason to have classified documents, particularly if they were in an unprotected area,” Pence continued. “But I will tell you that I believe there had to be many better ways to resolve that issue than executing a search warrant at the personal residence of a former president of the United States.”

While Pence’s vice presidential office in general did a rigorous job while he was leaving office of sorting through and turning over any classified material and unclassified material covered by the Presidential Records Act, these classified documents appear to have inadvertently slipped through the process because most of the materials were packed up separately from the vice president’s residence, along with Pence’s personal papers, the sources told ClNN.

The vice president’s residence at the US Naval Observatory in Washington has a secure facility for handling classified material along with other security, and it would be common for classified documents to be there for the vice president to review.

Some of the boxes at Pence’s Indiana home were packed up from the vice president’s residence, while some came from the White House in the final days of the Trump administration, which included last-minute things that did not go through the process the rest of Pence’s documents did.

The discovery of classified documents in Pence’s residence marks the third time in recent history in which a president or vice president has inappropriately possessed classified material after leaving office. Both Biden and Trump are now being investigated by separate special counsels for their handling of classified materials.

Sources familiar with the process say Pence’s discovery of classified documents after the Trump and Biden controversies would suggest a more systemic problem related to classified material and the Presidential Records Act, which requires official records from the White House to be turned over to the National Archives at the end of an administration.

On Friday, the FBI searched Biden’s Wilmington residence for additional classified material, an unprecedented search of a sitting president’s home that turned up six additional items containing classified markings. The search was conducted after Biden’s lawyers discovered classified material in Wilmington following the initial discovery of classified documents at Biden’s private think office in November.

Biden’s attorneys say they are fully cooperating with the Justice Department, seeking to draw a distinction from the Trump investigation.

The FBI obtained a search warrant to search Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort in August. Federal investigators took that step because they believed Trump had not turned over all classified material despite a subpoena and were concerned records at Mar-a-Lago were being moved around.

Last week, Pence told Larry Kudlow in a Fox Business interview that he received the President’s Daily Brief at the vice president’s residence.

“I’d rise early. I’d go to the safe where my military aide would place those classified materials. I’d pull them out, review them,” Pence said. “I’d receive a presentation to them and then, frankly, more often than not Larry, I would simply return them back to the file that I’d received them in. They went in commonly into what was called a burn bag that my military aide would gather and then destroy those classified materials—same goes in materials that I would receive at the White House.”

Read original article here

Entertainment

Taylor Swift: Live Nation exec will face lawmakers about concert tickets fiasco

Leave a comment


New York
CNN
 — 

Lawmakers are set to grill top executives from the event ticketing industry on Tuesday after Ticketmaster’s inability to process orders for Taylor Swift’s upcoming tour left millions of fans unable to buy tickets or without their ticket even after purchase.

Joe Berchtold, the president and CFO of Ticketmaster parent company Live Nation Entertainment, is set to testify before a Senate committee on Tuesday, two months after the Swift ticketing fiasco reignited public scrutiny of the industry. Jack Groetzinger, CEO of ticketing platform SeatGeek, is also scheduled to testify at the hearing.

Tickets for Swift’s new five-month Eras Tour – which kicks off March 17 and will have 52 concerts in multiple stadiums across the United States – went on sale on Ticketmaster in mid November. Heavy demand snarled the ticketing site, infuriating fans who couldn’t snag tickets. Customers complained about Ticketmaster not loading, saying the platform didn’t allow them to access tickets, even if they had a pre-sale code for verified fans.

Unable to resolve the problems, Ticketmaster subsequently canceled Swift’s concert ticket sales to the general public, citing “extraordinarily high demands on ticketing systems and insufficient remaining ticket inventory to meet that demand.”

As fury grew among legions of hardcore Swifties, Swift herself weighed in on the fiasco. “It goes without saying that I’m extremely protective of my fans,” Swift wrote on Instagram in November. “It’s really difficult for me to trust an outside entity with these relationships and loyalties, and excruciating for me to just watch mistakes happen with no recourse.”

As a result, the US Senate Judiciary Committee has scheduled the hearing on Tuesday, titled “That’s The Ticket: Promoting Competition and Protecting Consumers in Live Entertainment” to examine the lack of competition in the ticketing industry.

“The issues within America’s ticketing industry were made painfully obvious when Ticketmaster’s website failed hundreds of thousands of fans hoping to purchase tickets for Taylor Swift’s new tour, but these problems are not new,” Sen. Amy Klobuchar, who sits on the committee, said in a statement about the hearing. “We will examine how consolidation in the live entertainment and ticketing industries harms customers and artists alike. Without competition to incentivize better services and fair prices, we all suffer the consequences.”

In his prepared opening remarks, Berchtold blamed “industrial scalpers” for recent online ticketing snafus and called for legislation to rein in those bad actors. Ticketmaster, he said, was “hit with three times the amount of bot traffic than we had ever experienced” amid the “unprecedented demand for Taylor Swift tickets.” The bot activity “required us to slow down and even pause our sales. This is what led to a terrible consumer experience that we deeply regret.”

“As we said after the onsale, and I reiterate today, we apologize to the many disappointed fans as well as to Ms. Swift,” he said in the opening remarks. Berchtold also noted some things the service could have done differently “in hindsight,” including “staggering the sales over a longer period of time and doing a better job setting fan expectations for getting tickets.”

In addition to the executives, the committee said witnesses at the hearing will include Jerry Mickelson, CEO of Jam Productions, one of the largest producers of live entertainment, and singer-songwriter Clyde Lawrence.

Lawrence, who has composed music for motion pictures including the Disney+ holiday comedy movie “Noelle,” wrote an opinion piece for The New York Times in December titled “Taylor Swift’s Live Nation Debacle Is Just the Beginning,” in which he criticized Live Nation for allegedly being a monopoly and detrimental to artists.

“Whether it meets the legal definition of a monopoly or not, Live Nation’s control of the live music ecosystem is staggering,” he wrote.

Criticism of Ticketmaster’s dominance dates back decades, but the Swift ticketing incident has once again turned that issue into a dinner table discussion at many households.

Concert promoter Live Nation and ticketing company Ticketmaster, two of the largest companies in the concert business, announced their merger in 2009. The deal at the time raised concerns, including from the US Department of Justice, that it would create a near-monopoly in the industry.

The Justice Department allowed the Live Nation-Ticketmaster merger to proceed despite a 2010 court filing in the case that raised objections to the merger. In the filing, the Justice Department said that Ticketmaster’s share among major concert venues exceeded 80%.

Ticketmaster disputes that market share estimate and says it holds at most just over 30% of the concert market, according to comments on NPR recently by Berchtold.

While irate fans were left scrambling to wade through the Swift ticket confusion, their collective anger caught lawmakers’ attention.

Members of Congress used the debacle to criticize Ticketmaster’s control of the live music industry, saying that because Ticketmaster dominates so heavily, it has no reason to make things better for the millions of customers who have no other choice.

“Ticketmaster’s power in the primary ticket market insulates it from the competitive pressures that typically push companies to innovate and improve their services,” Klobuchar, who chairs the antitrust subcommittee, wrote in an open letter to Ticketmaster’s CEO in November. “That can result in the types of dramatic service failures we saw this week, where consumers are the ones that pay the price.”

Senator Richard Blumenthal echoed Klobuchar’s concerns. He tweeted at the time that the tour “is a perfect example of how the Live Nation/Ticketmaster merger harms consumers by creating a near-monopoly.”

In December, lawmakers from the House Energy and Commerce Committee sent a letter to Live Nation CEO Michael Rapino, demanding a briefing on what went wrong and what steps the company is taking to fix the problems.

“The recent pre-sales ticketing process for Taylor Swift’s upcoming Eras tour – in which millions of fans endured delays, lockouts, and competition with aggressive scammers, scalpers and bots – raises concerns over the potential unfair and deceptive practices that face consumers and eventgoers,” the committee wrote in its letter.

The committee noted it had previously raised concerns about the industry’s business practices and said it wanted to meet with Rapino to discuss how the company processes tickets for concerts and major tours. It also wants answers about how Ticketmaster plans to improve in the future.

Brian A. Marks, a senior lecturer in the department of economics and business analytics at University of New Haven’s Pompea College of Business, said he would have liked Swift to make an appearance at the hearing.

“This hearing seems to be focused on Swift and what happened with the ticket sales. We also have to remember that Taylor Swift and her team negotiated a contract with Ticketmaster for sale of her concert ticket,” said Marks.

“Will Congress want to look at that contract? To me, what happened with the Swift concert tickets was not necessarily the result of Ticketmaster being the dominant player in the industry,” he said. Artists, and especially larger artists like Swift, “are free to elsewhere,” he said. “This point may get missed in tomorrow’s hearing.”

– CNN’s Frank Pallotta, Chris Isidore and David Goldman contributed to this story



Read original article here

Business

FDA wants to simplify the use and updating of Covid-19 vaccines

Leave a comment



CNN
 — 

The US Food and Drug Administration wants to simplify the Covid-19 vaccine process to look more like what happens with the flu vaccine, according to documents posted online on Monday. That could include streamlining the vaccine composition, immunization schedules and periodic updates of Covid-19 vaccines.

The FDA said it expects to assess circulating strains of the virus that causes Covid-19 at least annually and decide in June which strains to select for the fall season, much like the process to update annual flu vaccines.

Moving forward, the agency said, most people may need only one dose of the latest Covid-19 shot to restore protection, regardless of how many shots they have already received. Two doses may be needed for people who are very young and haven’t been exposed, or for the elderly or immune-compromised, according to the FDA’s briefing document for its vaccine advisers.

The agency is urging a shift toward only one vaccine composition, rather than a combination of monovalent vaccines, which are currently used for primary shots and target only one strain, and bivalent vaccines, which are currently used for booster doses and target more than one strain.

“This simplification of vaccine composition should reduce complexity, decrease vaccine administration errors due to the complexity of the number of different vial presentations, and potentially increase vaccine compliance by allowing clearer communication,” the FDA said.

The FDA’s plan was first reported by National Public Radio.

The agency’s independent vaccine advisers, the Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee, are scheduled to meet on Thursday to discuss the future of Covid-19 vaccine regimens, and will be asked to vote on whether they recommend parts of FDA’s plan.

Read original article here

US

FBI searches Biden’s Wilmington home and finds more classified materials

Leave a comment



CNN
 — 

FBI investigators on Friday found additional classified material while conducting a search of President Joe Biden’s Wilmington, Delaware, home.

Bob Bauer, the president’s personal attorney, said in a statement that during the search, which took place over nearly 13 hours Friday, “DOJ took possession of materials it deemed within the scope of its inquiry, including six items consisting of documents with classification markings and surrounding materials, some of which were from the President’s service in the Senate and some of which were from his tenure as Vice President. DOJ also took for further review personally handwritten notes from the vice-presidential years.”

Those six items are in addition to materials previously found at Biden’s Wilmington residence and in his private office.

The federal search of BIden’s home, while voluntary, marks an escalation of the probe into the president’s handling of classified documents and will inevitably draw comparisons to his predecessor, former President Donald Trump – even if the FBI’s search of Trump’s residence was conducted under different circumstances.

The FBI five months ago obtained a search warrant to search Trump’s Florida residence, Mar-a-Lago, an unprecedented step that was taken because federal investigators had evidence suggesting Trump had not handed over all classified materials in his possession after receiving a subpoena to turn over classified documents to the National Archives. Trump’s handling of classified material at Mar-a-Lago is also the subject of a special counsel investigation led by Jack Smith.

The search shows that federal investigators are swiftly moving forward with the probe into classified documents found in Biden’s possession. It was overseen by the office of Trump-appointed US Attorney John Lausch, who has been handling the initial review of the Justice Department’s probe.

Lausch did not request any searches of Biden properties during his initial review, according to a source familiar with the investigation. He also did not wait for Biden team to complete their voluntary searches before recommending a special counsel.

Robert Hur, who was appointed a little more than a week ago, is still transitioning to his role as special counsel. A spokesperson for the Justice Department tells CNN “we expect Special Counsel Hur to be on board shortly.”

The FBI search was done with the consent of the president’s attorneys, people briefed on the matter said. The FBI also previously picked up documents found at the residence, which the Biden team disclosed last week.

The search did not require a search warrant or subpoena, according to a person familiar with the matter.

Bauer said that representatives of Biden’s personal legal team and the White House Counsel’s Office were present during the “thorough search,” during which they had “full access” to the Biden home.

Bauer added that the DOJ “requested that the search not be made public in advance, in accordance with its standard procedures, and we agreed to cooperate.”

The first documents were found in Biden’s private office on November 2 but not publicly revealed until earlier this month when CBS first reported their existence.

Since then, another search in December found a “small number” of records with classified markings in the garage of Biden’s Wilmington house and a third discovery was made at the Wilmington residence in January, when Biden’s legal team searched the rest of the property for documents. They found them, in a room adjacent to the garage.

Bauer said in a January 11 statement that once Biden’s personal attorneys found the classified documents, they left the document where it was found and suspended their search of the space where it was located.

“We found a handful of documents were filed in the wrong place,” Biden explained Thursday during a tour of storm damage in California.

“I think you’re going to find there’s nothing there. I have no regrets,” Biden continued on Thursday.

Neither Biden nor first lady Dr. Jill Biden were present during the search, special counsel to the president Richard Sauber said in a statement.

Biden, Sauber wrote, “has been committed to handling this responsibly because he takes this seriously” and he and his team are “working swiftly to ensure DOJ and the Special Counsel have what they need to conduct a thorough review.”

Bauer said that investigators had full access to Biden’s home during the search, which included “personally handwritten notes, files, papers, binders, memorabilia, to-do lists, schedules, and reminders going back decades.”

Biden is spending this weekend at his Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, home. Asked Friday by the Associated Press if the visit had anything to do with documents being found at Biden’s Wilmington home, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre referred reporters to White House counsel’s office and the Department of Justice, but said that Biden “often travels to Delaware on the weekends.”

This story has been updated with additional reporting.

Read original article here

Science

South Korea’s moon probe captures stunning Earth, moon images

Leave a comment

Sign up for CNN’s Wonder Theory science newsletter. Explore the universe with news on fascinating discoveries, scientific advancements and more.



CNN
 — 

South Korea’s first lunar probe has returned some striking images of Earth and the moon.

The Korean Pathfinder Lunar Orbiter began orbiting the moon in December after the Korea Aerospace Research Institute’s spacecraft had launched aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Cape Canaveral, Florida, in August.

The probe, also known as “Danuri” thanks to a public naming contest in the country that combined the Korean words for moon and enjoy, will orbit the moon for 11 months.

The stunning images captured by the probe showcasing Earth and the moon in black and white look like something photographer Ansel Adams might have taken had he ever enjoyed such an opportunity. The orbiter is flying at an altitude of 62 miles (100 kilometers) above the lunar surface.

Data collected by the orbiter will be used to inform future lunar exploration, including the Artemis program, which eventually aims to land humans at the lunar south pole in late 2024.

The probe’s imagery could help with selecting landing sites for future Artemis missions, as well as mapping resources like water.

South Korea signed the Artemis Accords in 2021 and collaborates with NASA on lunar exploration.

The probe carries six instruments, including the NASA-funded ShadowCam, developed by Arizona State University.

Universities and research institutes in South Korea developed the probe’s high-resolution camera to scout future landing sites, a polarized camera to analyze surface particles, an instrument to measure the lunar magnetic field and a gamma-ray spectrometer to identify elements in the lunar surface.

ShadowCam’s main objective is to take images of the permanently shadowed regions near the lunar poles that will help researchers searching for ice, mapping terrain and watching for seasonal changes.

ShadowCam is several hundred times more sensitive than the cameras on NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, enabling it to take detailed images in incredibly low-light conditions.

The probe recently used ShadowCam to peer inside Shackleton crater, one of the permanently shadowed regions on the lunar surface.

Previous images taken of this crater by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter were able to spot its illuminated rim, but ShadowCam could actually see the interior, including the crater floor and boulder tracks that rocks left behind after tumbling inside.

Officials at the Korea Aerospace Research Institute, or KARI, sees the Danuri orbiter as a “first step for ensuring and verifying its capability of space exploration,” according to the organization.

The US, Russia, Japan, China, European Union and India have all sent missions to the moon, and South Korea wants to dive into space exploration and develop its own missions.

“Korea is planning to successfully land onto the surface of the Moon or asteroids and make safe return,” according to the institute. “Korea is expecting to achieve strategic space technologies.”

In addition to the orbiter, KARI aims to make an initial lunar landing on the moon by 2030.

Read original article here

Health

Flu, Covid-19 and RSV are all trending down for the first time in months

Leave a comment



CNN
 — 

A rough respiratory virus season in the US appears to be easing, as three major respiratory viruses that have battered the country for the past few months are finally all trending down at the same time.

A new dataset from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention shows that the number of emergency department visits for the three viruses combined – flu, Covid-19 and RSV – have dropped to the lowest they’ve been in three months. The decline is apparent across all age groups.

Measuring virus transmission levels can be challenging; health officials agree that Covid-19 cases are vastly undercounted, and surveillance systems used for flu and RSV capture a substantial, but incomplete picture.

But experts say that tracking emergency department visits can be a good indicator of how widespread – and severe – the respiratory virus season is.

“There’s the chief complaint. When you show up to the emergency room, you complain about something,” said Janet Hamilton, executive director at Council of State and Territorial Epidemiologists. “Being able to look at the proportion of individuals that seek care at an emergency department for these respiratory illness concerns is a really good measure of the respiratory disease season.”

In the week following Thanksgiving, emergency department visits for respiratory viruses topped 235,000 – matching rates from last January, according to the CDC data.

While the surge in emergency department visits early in the year was due almost entirely to Omicron, the most recent spike was much more varied. In the week ending December 3, about two-thirds of visits were for flu, about a quarter were for Covid-19 and about 10% were for RSV.

Grouping the impact of all respiratory viruses together in this way offers an important perspective.

“There’s a strong interest in thinking about respiratory diseases in a more holistic way,” Hamilton said. “Transmission is the same. And there are certain types of measures that are good protection against all respiratory diseases. So that could really help people understand that when we are in high circulation for respiratory diseases, there are steps that you can take – just in general.”

Now, Covid-19 again accounts for most emergency department visits but flu and RSV are still the reason behind about a third of visits – and they’re all trending down for the first time since the respiratory virus season started picking up in September.

More new data from the CDC shows that overall respiratory virus activity continues to decline across the country. Only four states, along with New York City and Washington, DC, had “high” levels of influenza-like illness. Nearly all states were in this category less than a month ago.

Whether that pattern will hold is still up in the air, as vaccination rates for flu and Covid-19 are lagging and respiratory viruses can be quite fickle. Also, while the level of respiratory virus activity is lower than it’s been, it’s still above baseline in most places and hospitals nationwide are still about 80% full.

RSV activity started to pick up in September, reaching a peak in mid-November when 5 out of every 100,000 people – and 13 times as many children younger than five – were hospitalized in a single week.

RSV particularly affects children, and sales for over-the-counter children’s pain- and fever-reducing medication were 65% higher in November than they were a year before, according to the Consumer Healthcare Products Association. While “the worst may be over,” demand is still elevated, CHPA spokesperson Logan Ramsey Tucker told CNN in an email – sales were up 30% year-over-year in December.

But this RSV season has been significantly more severe than recent years, according to CDC data. The weekly RSV hospitalization rate has dropped to about a fifth of what it was two months ago, but it is still higher than it’s been in previous seasons.

Flu activity ramped up earlier than typical, but seems to have already reached a peak. Flu hospitalizations – about 6,000 new admissions last week – have dropped to a quarter of what they were at their peak a month and a half ago, and CDC estimates for total illnesses, hospitalizations and deaths from flu so far this season have stayed within the bounds of what can be expected. It appears the US has avoided the post-holiday spike that some experts cautioned against, but the flu is notoriously unpredictable and it’s not uncommon to see a second bump later in season.

The Covid-19 spike has not been as pronounced as flu, but hospitalizations did surpass levels from the summer. However, the rise in hospitalizations that started in November has started to tick down in recent weeks and CDC data shows that the share of the population living in a county with a “high” Covid-19 community level has dropped from 22% to about 6% over the past two weeks.

Still, the XBB.1.5 variant – which has key mutations that experts believe may be helping it to be more infectious – continues to gain ground in the US, causing about half of all infections last week. Vaccination rates continue to lag, with just 15% of the eligible population getting their updated booster and nearly one in five people remain completely unvaccinated.

Ensemble forecasts published by the CDC are hazy, predicting a “stable or uncertain trend” in Covid-19 hospitalizations and deaths over the next month.

And three years after the first Covid-19 case was confirmed in the US, the virus has not settled into a predictable pattern, according to Dr. Maria Van Kerkhove, the World Health Organization’s technical lead for the Covid-19 response.

“We didn’t need to have this level of death and devastation, but we’re dealing with it, and we are doing our best to minimize the impact going forward,” Van Kerkhove told the Conversations on Healthcare podcast this week.

Van Kerkhove says she does believe 2023 could be the year in which Covid-19 would no longer be deemed a public health emergency in the US and across the world, but more work needs to be done in order to make that happen and transitioning to longer-term respiratory disease management of the outbreak will take more time.

“We’re just not utilizing [vaccines] most effectively around the world. I mean 30% of the world still has not received a single vaccine,” she said. “In every country in the world, including in the US, we’re missing key demographics.”

Read original article here

US

Yellen warns of ‘global financial crisis’ if US debt limit agreement isn’t reached

Leave a comment



CNN
 — 

Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen on Friday warned of the widespread global effects that could be felt if the federal government exhausts extraordinary measures and fails to raise the debt ceiling, telling CNN’s Christiane Amanpour about the ways everyday Americans could face stark consequences.

Yellen’s warning comes after the United States on Thursday hit its $31.4 trillion debt limit set by Congress, forcing the Treasury Department to start taking extraordinary measures to keep the government paying its bills.

While those newly deployed extraordinary measures are largely behind-the-scenes accounting maneuvers, Yellen told Amanpour that “the actual date at which we would no longer be able to use these measures is quite uncertain, but it could conceivably come as early as early June.”

Speaking exclusively to CNN from Senegal, Yellen said that after the measures are exhausted, the US could experience at a minimum downgrading of its debt as a result of Congress failing to raise the debt ceiling. The effects of the federal government failing to make payments, she argued, could be as broad as a “global financial crisis.”

“If that happened, our borrowing costs would increase and every American would see that their borrowing costs would increase as well,” Yellen said. “On top of that, a failure to make payments that are due, whether it’s the bondholders or to Social Security recipients or to our military, would undoubtedly cause a recession in the US economy and could cause a global financial crisis.”

“It would certainly undermine the role of the dollar as a reserve currency that is used in transactions all over the world. And Americans – many people would lose their jobs and certainly their borrowing costs would rise,” she continued.

Yellen wrote a letter to House Speaker Kevin McCarthy on Thursday explaining the measures being taken, escalating pressure on Capitol Hill to avoid a catastrophic default.

Hardline Republicans have demanded that lifting the borrowing cap be tied to spending reductions. The White House has countered by saying that it will not offer any concessions or negotiate on raising the debt ceiling. And so far, Yellen’s warnings have failed to spark bipartisan discussion, with both Republicans and Democrats reaffirming their rigid positions over the past week.

As part of the debt issuance suspension period using extraordinary measures, the agency intends to sell existing investments and suspend reinvestments of the Civil Service Retirement and Disability Fund and the Postal Service Retiree Health Benefits Fund. Also, it will suspend the reinvestment of a government securities fund of the Federal Employees Retirement System Thrift Savings Plan.

No federal retirees or employees will be affected, and the funds will be made whole once the impasse ends, Yellen said in the letter.

“I respectfully urge Congress to act promptly to protect the full faith and credit of the United States,” she wrote.

Read original article here