ReportWire

Tag: brand safety-nsf sensitive

  • Hurd says he won’t sign GOP presidential debate pledge | CNN Politics

    Hurd says he won’t sign GOP presidential debate pledge | CNN Politics



    CNN
     — 

    Former Texas Rep. Will Hurd, who announced his 2024 Republican presidential campaign earlier Thursday with an anti-Donald Trump message, said he won’t sign the Republican National Committee’s pledge to back the party’s ultimate nominee in order to participate in primary debates.

    “I won’t be signing any kind of pledges, and I don’t think parties should be trying to rig who should be on a debate stage,” he told CNN’s Kaitlan Collins Thursday evening.

    “I am not in the business of lying to the American people in order to get a microphone, and I’m not going to support Donald Trump. And so I can’t honestly say I’m going to sign something even if he may or may not be the nominee,” he added.

    Hurd joins a crowded field looking to challenge Trump, the front-runner for the nomination, and he admitted it’ll be “difficult for a dark-horse candidate like me.”

    An undercover CIA officer before entering politics, Hurd has been outspoken in his criticism of Trump following his indictment on federal charges over alleged mishandling of classified documents. Asked if the former president, who has pleaded not guilty to all charges, betrayed the country, Hurd said, “100% he did.”

    Hurd told Collins that if the allegations are true, “It’s slapping the men and women who put themselves in harm’s way every single night in order to keep us safe.”

    Hurd launched his campaign earlier in the day calling for “common sense.”

    “This is a decision that my wife and I decided to do because we live in complicated times and we need common sense,” he said on CBS earlier Thursday morning.

    “There are a number of generational defining challenges that we’re faced with in the United States of America – everything from the Chinese government trying to surpass us as the global superpower, the fact that inflation is persistent at a time when technologies like artificial intelligence is going to upend every single industry, and our kids, their scores in math, science and reading are the lowest they’ve ever been in this century,” the former congressman said.

    “These are the issues we should be talking about. And to be frank, I’m pissed that we’re not talking about these things,” Hurd added in the CBS interview.

    Besides Trump, Republican presidential contenders also include Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, former Vice President Mike Pence, South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott, former United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley, former Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson, former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum, tech entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy, Miami Mayor Francis Suarez and conservative talk radio host Larry Elder.

    “Too many of these candidates in this race are afraid of Donald Trump,” Hurd said on CBS of the GOP primary field.

    Hurd added that, if elected to the White House, he would not pardon Trump should the former president be convicted, adding that he thought it was “insane” that other candidates were open to the idea.

    Ramaswamy has committed to pardoning Trump if he’s elected president. Haley, Suarez and Elder have also suggested they would be inclined to do so.

    Hurd was a rare Republican critic of Trump during his time in Congress from 2015 to 2021. Representing a swing district in Texas that covered the largest stretch of the US-Mexico border of any congressional seat, he opposed Trump’s border wall and argued it was less effective than other forms of border security.

    Hurd was one of four House Republicans in 2019 to vote in support of a resolution condemning Trump’s racist tweets targeting four Democratic congresswomen of color. He also authored a New York Times op-ed in 2018 arguing that Trump was being manipulated by Russian President Vladimir Putin. Despite his outspoken criticism, Hurd said in 2019 that he would vote for Trump the following year were he to be the GOP nominee.

    Hurd had been fueling speculation about a potential presidential run with trips to early-voting primary states in recent months. Hurd was in New Hampshire last week and told local station WMUR 9 he was evaluating whether his candidacy would have a path to the GOP nomination. In January, he spoke at the annual meeting of the New Hampshire Republican Party – the same event where Trump kicked off his 2024 campaigning. Hurd also visited Iowa for the Faith and Freedom Coalition’s spring event that included several other 2024 GOP hopefuls.

    Hurd was the only Black Republican in the House when he announced in 2019 that he would not seek reelection and instead pursue opportunities outside government to “solve problems at the nexus between technology and national security.” Hurd served in the CIA for almost a decade before coming to Congress. As a congressman, he served on the House Intelligence Committee, which is charged with oversight of the US intelligence community.

    Hurd first ran for Congress in 2010, losing to Quico Canseco in a runoff for the GOP nomination. Four years later, Hurd defeated Canseco, by then a former congressman, in another primary runoff before narrowly unseating Democratic Rep. Pete Gallego in the general election. He was narrowly reelected in 2016 and 2018, defeating Gallego and Democrat Gina Ortiz Jones, respectively.

    This story has been updated with Hurd’s interview on CNN.

    Source link

  • China-based hackers breached US government email accounts, Microsoft and White House say | CNN Politics

    China-based hackers breached US government email accounts, Microsoft and White House say | CNN Politics



    CNN
     — 

    China-based hackers have breached email accounts at two-dozen organizations, including some United States government agencies, in an apparent spying campaign aimed at acquiring sensitive information, according to statements from Microsoft and the White House late Tuesday.

    The full scope of the hack is being investigated, but US officials and Microsoft have been quietly scrambling in recent weeks to assess the impact of the hack, which targeted unclassified email systems, and contain the fallout.

    The federal agency where the Chinese hackers were first detected was the State Department, a person familiar with the matter told CNN. The State Department then reported the suspicious activity to Microsoft, the person said.

    The Department of Commerce, which has sanctioned Chinese telecom firms, was also breached. The hackers accessed Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo’s email account, one source familiar with the investigation told CNN. The Washington Post first reported on the access of the secretary’s account.

    The Chinese hackers were detected targeting a small number of federal agencies and just a handful of officials’ email accounts at each agency in a hack aimed at specific officials, multiple sources familiar with the investigation told CNN.

    “Microsoft notified the (Commerce) Department of a compromise to Microsoft’s Office 365 system, and the Department took immediate action to respond,” a department spokesperson said in a statement on Wednesday.

    The spokesperson did not immediately reply to a request for comment on the targeting of Raimondo’s email account.

    The hackers targeted email accounts at the House of Representatives, but it was unclear who was targeted and if the breach attempts were successful, two sources familiar with the matter told CNN.

    The breaches add to what is already one of the steepest cybersecurity challenges facing the Biden administration: limiting the ability of Beijing’s formidable hacking teams to access US government and corporate secrets.

    “Last month, US government safeguards identified an intrusion in Microsoft’s cloud security, which affected unclassified systems,” National Security Council spokesperson Adam Hodge said in a statement to CNN.

    “Officials immediately contacted Microsoft to find the source and vulnerability in their cloud service,” Hodge said. “We continue to hold the procurement providers of the US Government to a high security threshold.”

    The State Department “detected anomalous activity, took immediate steps to secure our systems, and will continue to closely monitor and quickly respond to any further activity,” a department spokesperson said on Wednesday.

    US Capitol Police declined to comment, referring CNN to the FBI.

    Hodge did not identify who was behind the hack, but Microsoft executives said in a blog post that the hackers were based in China and focused on espionage.

    In response to the Microsoft and White House statements, the Chinese foreign ministry on Wednesday accused Washington of conducting its own hacking operations.

    US officials have consistently labeled China as the most advanced of US adversaries in cyberspace, a domain that has repeatedly been a source of bilateral tension in recent years. The FBI has said Beijing has a larger hacking program than all other governments combined.

    China has routinely denied the allegations.

    The hacking began in mid-May, when the China-based hackers used a stolen sign-in key to burrow their way into email accounts, according to Microsoft. The tech giant has since blocked the hackers from accessing customer emails using that technique, Microsoft said late Tuesday.

    Secretary of State Antony Blinken visited China in mid-June, but it was not immediately clear if the cyber-espionage campaign was connected to that high-stakes visit.

    Some US officials credited the State Department with investing in more cyber-defense capabilities, allowing the agency to detect the suspicious activity earlier than in past advanced hacks.

    The number of US organizations, public or private, impacted by the hacking campaign is in the “single digits,” a senior US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency official told reporters on Wednesday.

    “This appears to have been a very targeted, surgical campaign,” the official said.

    This story has been updated with additional information.

    Source link

  • Inside the long and winding road to Trump’s historic indictment | CNN Politics

    Inside the long and winding road to Trump’s historic indictment | CNN Politics



    CNN
     — 

    The New York grand jury hearing the case against Donald Trump was set to break for several weeks. The former president’s lawyers believed on Wednesday afternoon they had at least a small reprieve from a possible indictment. Trump praised the perceived delay.

    Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg had other plans.

    Thursday afternoon, Bragg asked the grand jury to return an historic indictment against Trump, the first time that a current or former US president has been indicted. The surprise move was the final twist in an investigation that’s taken a long and winding road to the history-making charges that were returned this week.

    An indictment had been anticipated early last week – including by Trump himself, who promoted a theory he would be “arrested” – as law enforcement agencies prepared for the logistics of arraigning a former president. But after the testimony of Robert Costello – a lawyer who appeared on Trump’s behalf seeking to undercut the credibility of Trump’s former attorney and fixer Michael Cohen – Bragg appeared to hit the pause button.

    Costello’s testimony caused the district attorney’s office to reassess whether Costello should be the last witness the grand jury heard before prosecutors asked them to vote on an indictment, multiple sources told CNN.

    So they waited. The next day the grand jury was scheduled to meet, jurors were told not to come in. Bragg and his top prosecutors huddled the rest of the week and over the weekend to determine a strategy that would effectively counter Costello’s testimony in the grand jury.

    They called two additional witnesses. David Pecker, the former head of the company that publishes the National Enquirer, appeared on Monday. The other witness, who has still not been identified, testified on Thursday for 35 minutes in front of the grand jury – just before prosecutors asked them to vote on the indictment of more than 30 counts, the sources said.

    Trump and his attorneys, thinking Bragg might be reconsidering a potential indictment, were all caught off-guard, sources said. Some of Trump’s advisers had even left Palm Beach on Wednesday following news reports that the grand jury was taking a break, the sources added.

    After the indictment, Trump ate dinner with his wife, Melania, Thursday evening and smiled while he greeted guests at his Mar-a-Lago club, according to a source familiar with the event.

    The Manhattan district attorney’s investigation into Trump has been ongoing for years, dating back to Bragg’s predecessor, Cy Vance. Its focus shifted by mid-2020 to the accuracy of the Trump Org.’s financial statements. At the time, prosecutors debated legal theories around the hush money payments and thought they were a long shot. At several points, the wide-ranging investigation seemed to have been winding down – to the point that prosecutors resigned in protest last year. One even wrote a book critical of Bragg for not pursuing charges against Trump released just last month.

    The specific charges against Trump still remain under seal and are expected to be unveiled Tuesday when Trump is set to be arraigned.

    There are questions swirling even among Trump critics over whether the Manhattan district attorney’s case is the strongest against the former president amid additional investigations in Washington, DC, and Georgia over both his efforts to overturn the 2020 election and his handling of classified documents at his Florida resort.

    Trump could still face charges in those probes, too, which are separate from the New York indictment.

    But it’s the Manhattan indictment, dating back to a payment made before the 2016 presidential election, that now sees Trump facing down criminal charges for the first time as he runs again for the White House in 2024.

    It was just weeks before the 2016 election when Cohen, Trump’s then-lawyer, paid adult film actress Stormy Daniels $130,000 to keep silent about an alleged affair with Trump. (Trump has denied the affair.) Cohen was later reimbursed $420,000 by the Trump Organization to cover the original payment and tax liabilities and to reward him with a bonus.

    That payment and reimbursement are keys at issue in the investigation.

    Cohen also helped arrange a $150,000 payment from the publisher of the National Enquirer to Karen McDougal to kill her story claiming a 10-month affair with Trump. Trump also denies an affair with McDougal. During the grand jury proceedings, the district attorney’s office has asked questions about the “catch and kill” deal with McDougal.

    When Cohen was charged by federal prosecutors in New York in 2018 and pleaded guilty, he said he was acting at the direction of Trump when he made the payment.

    At the time, federal prosecutors had determined they could not seek to indict Trump in the scheme because of US Justice Department regulations against charging a sitting president. In 2021, after Trump left the White House, prosecutors in the Southern District of New York decided not to pursue a case against Trump, according to a recent book from CNN senior legal analyst Elie Honig.

    But then-Manhattan District Attorney Vance’s team had already picked up the investigation into the hush money payments and begun looking at potential state law violations. By summer 2019, they sent subpoenas to the Trump Org., other witnesses, and met with Cohen, who was serving a three-year prison sentence.

    Vance’s investigation broadened to the Trump Org.’s finances. New York prosecutors went to the Supreme Court twice to enforce a subpoena for Trump’s tax records from his long-time accounting firm Mazars USA. The Trump Org. and its long-time chief financial officer Allen Weisselberg were indicted on tax fraud and other charges in June 2021 for allegedly running an off-the-books compensation scheme for more than a decade.

    Weisselberg pleaded guilty to the charges last year and is currently serving a five-month sentence at Rikers Island. Prosecutors had hoped to flip Weisselberg to cooperate against Trump, but he would not tie Trump to any wrongdoing.

    Disagreements about the pace of the investigation had caused at least three career prosecutors to move off the investigation. They were concerned that the investigation was moving too quickly, without clear evidence to support possible charges, CNN and others reported last year.

    Vance authorized the attorneys on the team to present evidence to the grand jury near the end of 2021, but he did not seek an indictment. Those close to Vance say he wanted to leave the decision to Bragg, the newly elected district attorney.

    Bragg, a Democrat, took office in January 2022. Less than two months into his tenure, two top prosecutors who had worked on the Trump case under Vance abruptly resigned amid a disagreement in the office over the strength of the case against Trump.

    On February 22, 2022, Bragg informed the prosecution team that he was not prepared to authorize charges against Trump, CNN reported. The prosecutors, Carey Dunne and Mark Pomerantz, resigned the next day.

    In his resignation letter, Pomerantz said he believed Trump was guilty of numerous felonies and said that Bragg’s decision to not move forward with an indictment at the time was “wrong” and a “grave failure of justice.”

    “I and others believe that your decision not to authorize prosecution now will doom any future prospects that Mr. Trump will be prosecuted for the criminal conduct we have been investigating,” Pomerantz wrote in the letter, which was reviewed by CNN.

    At that point, the investigation was focused on Trump’s financial statements and whether he knowingly misled lenders, insurers, and others by providing them false or misleading information about the value of his properties.

    Prosecutors were building a wide-ranging falsified business records case to include years of financial statements and the hush money payments, people with direct knowledge of the investigation told CNN. But at the time, those prosecutors believed there was a good chance a felony charge related to the hush money payment would be dismissed by a judge because it was a novel legal theory.

    Dunne and Pomerantz pushed to seek an indictment of Trump tied to the sweeping falsified business records case, but others, including some career prosecutors, were skeptical that they could win a conviction at trial, in part because of the difficulty in proving Trump’s criminal intent.

    Despite the resignations of the prosecutors on the Trump case, Bragg’s office reiterated at the time that the investigation was ongoing.

    “Investigations are not linear so we are following the leads in front of us. That’s what we’re doing,” Bragg told CNN in April 2022. “The investigation is very much ongoing.”

    At the same time that Bragg’s criminal investigation into Trump lingered last year, another prosecution against the Trump Org. moved forward. In December, two Trump Org. entities were convicted at trial on 17 counts and were ordered to pay $1.6 million, the maximum penalty, the following month.

    Trump was not personally charged in that case. But it appeared to embolden Bragg’s team to sharpen their focus back to Trump and the hush money payment.

    Cohen was brought back in to meet with Manhattan prosecutors. Cohen had previously met with prosecutors in the district attorney’s office 13 times over the course of the investigation. But the January meeting was the first in more than a year – and a clear sign of the direction prosecutors were taking.

    As investigators inched closer to a charging decision, Bragg was faced with more public pressure to indict Trump: Pomerantz, the prosecutor who had resigned a year prior, released a book about the investigation that argued Trump should be charged and criticized Bragg for failing to do so.

    “Every single member of the prosecution team thought that his guilt was established,” Pomerantz said in a February interview on “CNN This Morning.”

    Asked about Bragg’s hesitance, Pomerantz said: “I can’t speak in detail about what went through his mind. I can surmise from what happened at the time and statements that he’s made since that he had misgivings about the strength of the case.”

    Bragg responded in a statement saying that more work was needed on the case. “Mr. Pomerantz’s plane wasn’t ready for takeoff,” Bragg said.

    Prosecutors continued bringing in witnesses, including Pecker, the former head of American Media Inc., which publishes the National Enquirer. In February, Trump Org. controller Jeffrey McConney testified before the grand jury. Members of Trump’s 2016 campaign, including Kellyanne Conway and Hope Hicks, also appeared. In March, Daniels met with prosecutors, her attorney said.

    And Cohen, after his numerous meetings with prosecutors, finally testified before the grand jury in March.

    The second week of March, prosecutors gave the clearest sign to date that the investigation was nearing its conclusion – they invited Trump to appear before the grand jury.

    Potential defendants in New York are required by law to be notified and invited to appear before a grand jury weighing charges.

    Behind the scenes, Trump attorney Susan Necheles told CNN she met with New York prosecutors to argue why Trump shouldn’t be indicted and that prosecutors didn’t articulate the specific charges they are considering.

    Trump, meanwhile, took to his social media to predict his impending indictment. In a post attacking Bragg on March 18, Trump said the “leading Republican candidate and former president of the United States will be arrested on Tuesday of next week.”

    “Protest, take our nation back,” Trump added, echoing the calls he made while he tried to overturn the 2020 election.

    Trump’s prediction would turn out to be premature.

    Trump’s call for protests after a potential indictment led to meetings between senior staff members from the district attorney’s office, the New York Police Department and the New York State Court Officers – who provide security at the criminal court building in lower Manhattan.

    Trump’s lawyers also made a last-ditch effort to fend off an indictment. At the behest of Trump’s team, Costello, who advised Cohen in 2018, provided emails and testified to the grand jury on Monday, March 20, alleging that Cohen had said in 2018 that he had decided on his own to make the payment to Daniels.

    Costello’s testimony appeared to delay a possible indictment – for a brief time at least.

    During the void, Trump continued to launch verbal insults against Bragg, calling him a “degenerate psychopath.” And four Republican chairmen of the most powerful House committees wrote to Bragg asking him to testify, which Bragg’s office said was unprecedented interference in a local investigation. An envelope containing a suspicious white powder and a death threat to Bragg was to delivered to the building where the grand jury meets – the powder was deemed nonhazardous.

    The grand jury would not meet again until Monday, March 27, when Pecker was ushered back to the grand jury in a government vehicle with tinted windows in a failed effort to evade detection by the media camped outside of the building where the grand jury meets.

    Pecker, a longtime friend of Trump’s who had a history of orchestrating so-called “catch and kill” deals while at the National Enquirer, was involved with the Daniels’ deal from the beginning.

    Two days after Pecker’s testimony, there were multiple reports that the grand jury was going into a pre-planned break in April. The grand jury was set to meet Thursday but it was not expected to hear the Trump case.

    Instead, the grand jury heard from one last witness in the Trump case on Thursday, whose identity is still unknown. And then the grand jury shook up the American political system by voting to indict a former president and 2024 candidate for the White House.

    Source link

  • Exclusive: National security officials tell special counsel Trump was repeatedly warned he did not have the authority to seize voting machines | CNN Politics

    Exclusive: National security officials tell special counsel Trump was repeatedly warned he did not have the authority to seize voting machines | CNN Politics


    Washington
    CNN
     — 

    Former top national security officials have testified to a federal grand jury that they repeatedly told former President Donald Trump and his allies that the government didn’t have the authority to seize voting machines after the 2020 election, CNN has learned.

    Chad Wolf, the former acting Homeland Security secretary, and his former deputy Ken Cuccinelli were asked about discussions inside the administration around DHS seizing voting machines when they appeared before the grand jury earlier this year, according to three people familiar with the proceedings. Cuccinelli testified that he “made clear at all times” that DHS did not have the authority to take such a step, one of the sources said.

    Trump’s former national security adviser Robert O’Brien, in a closed-door interview with federal prosecutors earlier this year, also recounted conversations about seizing voting machines after the 2020 election, including during a heated Oval Office meeting that Trump participated in, according to a source familiar with the matter.

    Details about the secret grand jury testimony and O’Brien’s interview, neither of which have been previously reported, illustrate how special counsel Jack Smith and his prosecutors are looking at the various ways Trump tried to overturn his electoral loss despite some of his top officials advising him against the ideas.

    Now some of those same officials, including Wolf, Cuccinelli and O’Brien, as well as others who have so far refused to testify, may have to return to the grand jury in Washington, DC, to provide additional testimony after a series of pivotal court rulings that were revealed in recent weeks rejected Trump’s claims of executive privilege.

    Cuccinelli was spotted going back into the grand jury on Tuesday, April 4.

    Without that privilege shield, former officials must answer questions about their interactions and conversations with the former president, including what he was told about the lack of evidence for election fraud and the legal remedies he could pursue.

    That line of questioning goes to the heart of Smith’s challenge in any criminal case he might bring – to prove that Trump and his allies pursued their efforts despite knowing their fraud claims were false or their gambits weren’t lawful. To bring any potential criminal charges, prosecutors would have to overcome Trump’s public claim that he believed then and now that fraud really did cost him the election.

    “There’s lots of ways you can show that. But certainly one of them is if they were told by people who knew what they were talking about, that that there was no basis to take the actions,” said Adav Noti, an election law attorney who previously served in the US Attorney’s Office in Washington, DC, and at the Federal Election Commission’s general counsel’s office.

    “I would not want to be a defense lawyer trying to argue, ‘Well, yes, my client was told that, but he never really believed it,’” Noti said.

    Inside the Trump White House after the 2020 election, the push to seize voting machines eventually led to executive orders being drafted in mid-December of that year, directing the military and DHS to carry out the task despite Wolf and Cuccinelli telling Trump and his allies their agency did not have the authority to do so.

    Those orders, which cited debunked claims about voting system irregularities in Michigan and Georgia, were presented to Trump by his former national security adviser Michael Flynn and then-lawyer Sidney Powell during a now-infamous Oval Office meeting on December 18.

    Smith’s team has asked witnesses about that meeting in front of the grand jury and during closed-door interviews, multiple sources told CNN. Among them was O’Brien, who told the January 6 House select committee that he was patched into the December 18 meeting by phone after it had already devolved into a screaming match between Flynn, Powell and White House lawyers, according to a transcript of O’Brien’s deposition that was released by the panel.

    O’Brien told the committee that at some point someone asked him if there was evidence of election fraud or foreign interference in the voting machines. “And I said, ‘No, we’ve looked into that and there’s no evidence of it,” O’Brien said he responded. “I was told we didn’t have any evidence of any voter machine fraud in the 2020 election.”

    When asked about that meeting by federal prosecutors working for Smith, O’Brien reiterated that he made clear there was no evidence of foreign interference affecting voting machines, according to the source familiar with the matter.

    O’Brien met with prosecutors earlier this year after receiving a subpoena from Smith’s team and is among the Trump officials who could be called back to discuss conversations with Trump under the judge’s recent decision on executive privilege.

    Former Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe, who personally told allies of the former president that there was no evidence of foreign election interference or widespread fraud that would justify taking extreme steps like seizing voting machines, must also testify, the judge decided.

    A spokesperson for Ratcliffe did not respond to CNN’s request for comment. Wolf declined to comment.

    Cuccinelli acknowledged to the January 6 committee last year that, after the election, he was asked several times by Trump’s then-attorney Rudy Giuliani, and on at least one occasion by Trump himself, if DHS had authority to seize voting machines. Wolf told the committee he was repeatedly asked the same question by then White House chief of staff Mark Meadows.

    Giuliani, who was subpoenaed by the Justice Department before Smith took over the investigation, previously acknowledged to the January 6 committee that he participated in that December 18 Oval Office meeting and other conversations about having DHS and the military seize voting machines.

    Giuliani told congressional investigators that he and his team “tried many different ways to see if we could get the machines seized,” including options involving DHS, according to the transcript of his committee interview. Giuliani also acknowledged taking part in conversations – even before the Dec. 18 Oval Office meeting – where the idea of using the military to seize voting machines was raised.

    “I can remember the issue of the military coming up much earlier and constantly saying, ‘Will you forget about it, please? Just shut up. You want to go to jail? Just shut up. We’re not using the military,’” he added.

    Robert Costello, an attorney for Giuliani, told CNN that Giuliani has not received a subpoena from Smith. Costello said that in early November, Giuliani was subpoenaed by the DC US Attorney seeking documents and testimony. Costello says he told the Justice Department Giuliani couldn’t comply with the given deadlines because they were in the middle of disciplinary proceedings at the time. That was the last time Giuliani heard from DOJ, says Costello.

    “I haven’t heard a word since November 2022,” Costello told CNN on March 30.

    Source link

  • Sexual assaults in the US military increased by 1% last year | CNN Politics

    Sexual assaults in the US military increased by 1% last year | CNN Politics



    CNN
     — 

    The US military saw a 1% increase in sexual assaults last year, according to the Pentagon’s latest annual report.

    There were 7,378 reports of sexual assault against service members in 2022, according to the Fiscal Year 2022 Annual Report on Sexual Assault in the Military, released on Thursday. That is up from 7,260 reports of assault in 2021.

    All of the services aside from the Army saw an increase in reports from last year, officials said during a briefing on the report on Thursday: the Navy, Marine Corps, and Air Force saw a 9%, 3.6%, and 13% increase in reports, respectively. The Army, meanwhile, saw a 9% decrease.

    Overall, the number of reports of assault has consistently increased in the military since 2010.

    And while the Defense Department is working through implementing dozens of recommendations from an independent review commission on sexual assault, officials said commanders and service members on the ground still have a responsibility to do their part.

    “At the end of the day, we can only do so much at the headquarters level,” Beth Foster, director of the Office of Force Resiliency, told reporters. “But, you know, really, this is on our commanders, on our [non-commissioned officers], our frontline leaders to make sure that they are addressing this problem. And, you know, the Secretary says … we need to lead on that. And that that is for at every level of the department.”

    In addition to the 7,378 reports of assault that occurred during military service in 2022, there were also 797 Defense Department civilians who reported being assaulted by service members, and 580 service members who reported being assaulted before their military service.

    The report released Thursday looks at the number of sexual assault reports, as opposed to a separate report the Pentagon releases every other year that estimates the total number of service members experiencing sexual assault. Ideally, the Defense Department has said a sign of progress would be seeing the number of reports go up, while the prevalence of sexual assault go down.

    However, the 2021 prevalence survey – released August 2022 – showed an in increase in how many service members were estimated to have experienced assault. The Pentagon estimated that 35,875 service members experienced unwanted sexual contact in 2021.

    Also, within the report released on Thursday was data showing a decrease in how many cases of assault, which had evidence that supported the charges, were referred to court-martial by commanders. Only 37% of cases were referred to court-martial in 2022, which falls in line with a steady decrease over the last 10 years.

    Instead, there has been an increase in cases that are dealt with through administrative action and discharges of offenders. Dr. Nate Galbreath, the deputy director for the Defense Department’s Sexual Assault Prevention and Response Office, told reporters on Thursday that the decrease in court-martials is in part because of support being provided to victims of military sexual assault.

    “One of the things that we’ve seen year after a year since 2015, with the addition of the Special Victims Counsel program – which are attorneys that represent victims throughout the military justice process – is that victims have made it abundantly clear that they would like to help see the department hold their offenders appropriately accountable, but they’d like to do it through nonconfrontational means, and that’s essentially what we see in the percentages with administrative actions and discharges and non-judicial punishment,” Galbreath said.

    He added, however, that the decrease in taking sexual assault cases to court is also due to victims not having faith in the military justice system to handle their cases appropriately.

    The military services’ newly appointed Special Trial Counsels, who are appointed officers that report directly to the service secretaries and have exclusive authority to prosecute sexual assault cases, will be charged with restoring “that perception of fairness back into the system.”

    Ultimately, officials reiterated that while work is ongoing, the ongoing trend of sexual assault isn’t going to change “overnight.”

    “We certainly, if we could flip a switch and make this change instantly, we would,” Foster said. “But we know this is going to take some time.”

    Source link

  • Why are so many Americans unhappy with the state of the US today? Here’s what they said in CNN’s latest poll | CNN Politics

    Why are so many Americans unhappy with the state of the US today? Here’s what they said in CNN’s latest poll | CNN Politics



    CNN
     — 

    It’s one of the most commonly asked poll questions: How do Americans feel about the state of the nation? And recently, the answer has usually been a negative one.

    But figuring out why people are unhappy is complicated. CNN’s latest polling asked Americans whether things in the country were going well or badly – and then, to explain in their own words, why they felt that way.

    Among the 69% who said things were going either pretty or very badly, dim views of the nation’s economic conditions were a top driver. The smaller share who were more positive often cited their own, rosier takes on the economy.

    Other factors that influenced Americans’ outlooks, whether positive or negative, included their views of the current occupant of the White House, opinions on social issues, conclusions drawn from their daily lives or a combination of disparate concerns. Their explanations help shed light on what respondents really mean when they answer the broad, state-of-the-nation questions frequently included on surveys.

    Here’s a look at some common themes that emerged in our latest poll, as well as a sampling of responses from people across the country. Some answers have been lightly edited for length, grammar and clarity.

    Views of the nation and the economy often go hand in hand. Asked to explain their view of how things are going in the US today, both 35% of those who said things were going well and 52% who said things were going badly mentioned economic factors.

    Slightly over half of women, men, Whites, people of color, those younger than 45 and those 45 and older who said things were going badly all mentioned the economy when asked to explain why they felt that way.

    But there were differences both along and within partisan lines among this pessimistic group.

    A 58% majority of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents cited the economy as a reason for their discontent, with a smaller 42% of Democrats and Democratic leaners saying the same.

    Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents younger than 45 were 11 points likelier than their older counterparts to cite an economic reason. Among Republicans, there was no difference by age in the share citing the economy.

    Beyond general concerns about the economy, issues such as inflation and the cost of living hit home for many Americans who said the country was doing badly.

    • “Cost of living is way too high. Just seems like the economy is not doing very well, but it has been like this for years. Housing market is terrible, gas prices are terrible. Student loan debt is astronomical. Even though I agree students should pay their own loan, it shouldn’t be that expensive in the first place.” – Republican man, 29, from Pennsylvania
    • “A single mother cannot effectively support a household on one income. The price of everything is too high. Rent [is] outrageous while people trying to get a loan to buy a home is also unreachable to most.” – Republican woman, 30, from Iowa
    • “The economy is TERRIBLE. My cost of living is MUCH MUCH MUCH higher. Go to the grocery store and you will find out.” – Republican-leaning man, 71, from Illinois

    By contrast, those in the positive camp largely focused on the availability of jobs and a perception that the economy was improving. Among this group, Americans in households making $50,000 or more annually were 19 percentage points more likely than those in lower-earning households to name economic factors as a reason to say things were going well, 44% to 25%.

    • “The economy is doing well. I’m unhappy with women losing bodily autonomy, and the creeping fascism from the right, but I believe Biden is doing an excellent job with the economy, the environment, and international relations.” – Democratic woman, 65, from North Dakota
    • “There are still changes that I hope will be made, but for the most part we’re heading in the right direction. There is food on the shelves at the grocery stores. There are jobs at slightly better pay than before the pandemic.” – Democratic woman, 52, from Michigan
    • “Unemployment is at a historic low, economy isn’t bad. Inflation is a sign that people have more money.” – Democratic-leaning man, 51, from Massachusetts

    The public’s views of the economy are often deeply polarized, with Americans far more likely to rate conditions as good when their party holds the White House – either because their political beliefs drive them to different conclusions or because they treat survey questions as a way to tout their partisan allegiances.

    Views about the broader state of the US were also deeply polarized in CNN’s latest poll, with a near-unanimous 91% of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents saying things in the US were going badly, a view shared by 48% of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents.

    Among those who said things were going badly, 11% put the blame primarily on President Joe Biden or the Democrats, with smaller shares pointing to Congress or the government as a whole. Among Republicans and Republican leaners in that camp, the share was 17%

    • “My country is having a real rough time under Biden’s presidency. Things have gone downhill the past few years.” – Republican woman, 80, from Pennsylvania
    • “This country is going down the tubes. He has ruined it with everything he’s done. At least Trump was making America great again.” – Republican woman, who did not give her exact age, from New York
    • “Congress is simply not focused on working together to resolve the problems facing our country.” – Republican man, 65, from Colorado

    Among those who said things were going well, 5% credited Biden or the Democratic Party, and 6% offered comments opposing former President Donald Trump, with others citing improvements in government leadership or a general sense of stability.

    • “We have moved out of the dishonest and corrupt shadows of the Trump and ‘conservative’ fascist dominated term of misgovernance.” – Democratic man, 44, from Nebraska
    • “I think it could be so much worse, and the president is doing the best he can do with all the problems we have.” – Democratic-leaning woman, 67, from New Jersey
    • “Democrats are in office. Republicans will NEVER do anything to help the working class and poor.” – Democratic man, 60, from Indiana

    Others saw polarization itself as the issue. Of those who said things in the US were going badly, 7% said it was because they were concerned about political or societal divisions in the country. Democrats (13%) and those with college degrees (12%) were likelier than others to mention the issue as a main reason for their discontent.

    • “We’re more divided than we’ve ever been. The GOP is trying to destroy diversity, take away women’s and LGBTQ rights. It’s a disaster here.” – Democratic woman, 37, from Connecticut
    • “We have never been so divided as a nation on almost every topic and Biden is making it worse.” – Republican man, 60, from Kansas
    • “The division among the citizens continues to grow. Nobody cares about their neighbors and the community.” – independent man, 38, from Texas

    Among those unhappy with the state of the country, a significant share, 16%, cited crime or gun violence. But their precise focus varied widely, spanning everything from concerns about unrest and lawlessness to dismay about school shootings. Women were slightly more likely than men to express such concerns. A smaller share of Americans also mentioned a related constellation of issues, including policing, the criminal justice system, homelessness and drugs.

    Another 10% of those who said things were going badly mentioned immigration or the situation at the border, with that concern relatively high among Republicans (17% of whom cited the issue), those age 45 and older (15%) and White Americans (12%).

    • “The massive amount of senseless gun violence” – Democratic woman, 30, from California
    • “The biggest thing is the violence in major cities.” – Republican woman, 71, from Ohio
    • “Too many people killing kids and adults. Too much aggression and violence.” – independent woman, 40, from Oregon
    • “I say things are going pretty badly because they are not handling the gun violence and school shootings. Children do not feel safe going to schools because they are afraid of someone in their school or someone coming to their school shooting it up, because it’s so easy to buy a gun now, and because most parents have them and are not watching them or locking them up away from their children. … As an African American, I feel scared for my life every time I step out the house, because I never know when something is going to happen or I get into a situation with a cop and it goes badly.” – independent woman, 18, from Texas
    • “Country is headed for a depression with all these illegal immigrants costing us in money, resources, etc. Getting close to World War III. Lawlessness pervades us.” – Republican-leaning woman, 66, from Kansas

    In stark contrast to the widespread discontent with the state of the nation, most Americans tend to be relatively satisfied with the course of their own lives. That shaped the broader outlooks of some of those surveyed – among those who said that things in the country were going well, 8% pointed at least in part to positive aspects of their own lives.

    • “For me, I have a job, a family and have everything that I need.” – Democratic man, 70, from Texas
    • “I’m not living in a box or a tent.” – Republican man, 63, from Pennsylvania
    • “I’m in the military and my life hasn’t been impacted like others have.” – independent woman, 26, from Oklahoma
    • “I’m looking in the mirror. You listen to the news but also to your own world.” – Democratic man, 60, from Pennsylvania
    • “Everything comes down to our individual personal situation, and mine is better than it has been throughout most of my life. … Our environmental issues for future generations do not apply to me as it is highly unlikely there will be a future generation of my family. … Inflation is of little concern to me as I have always waited to buy everything on sale, and I know how to cook economically. My health is excellent. My finances are sound.” – Republican woman, 78, from Nebraska

    The CNN Poll was conducted by SSRS from March 1 through March 31 among a random national sample of 1,595 adults initially reached by mail. Surveys were either conducted online or by telephone with a live interviewer. Results for the full sample have a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 3.3 percentage points; it is larger for subgroups.

    Source link

  • NY judge to hear arguments over DA’s bid to limit Trump’s ability to publicize information in criminal case | CNN Politics

    NY judge to hear arguments over DA’s bid to limit Trump’s ability to publicize information in criminal case | CNN Politics



    CNN
     — 

    A New York judge will hear arguments Thursday over a proposed protective order in Donald Trump’s criminal case that would limit the former president’s ability to publicize information about the investigation.

    The Manhattan district attorney’s office is seeking to restrain Trump’s access to the evidence it turns over to his attorneys, in part, it says, because of his social media posts about the District Attorney Alvin Bragg and witnesses in the case.

    Trump will not be in attendance at Thursday’s hearing with Judge Juan Merchan.

    The former president’s attorneys oppose the DA’s proposal, arguing that the state should be just as restrained as Trump from what information it can discuss publicly and says that Trump, as a presidential candidate, should have the ability to defend himself against the charges while campaigning.

    “To state the obvious, there will continue to be significant public commentary about this case and his candidacy, to which he has a right and a need to respond, both for his own sake and for the benefit of the voting public,” Trump’s attorneys wrote.

    The proposed protective order submitted by prosecutors, Trump’s attorneys wrote, “would severely hamper President Trump’s ability to publicly defend himself and prepare for trial.”

    Trump’s attorneys are asking that any limitations to disclosing evidence in the case be placed on both Trump and the district attorney’s office. They criticized a press conference held by Bragg last month as revealing information that they say would be violated by the district attorney’s own proposed order.

    “Surprisingly, the People apparently believe that New York law allows the District Attorney’s Office and its witnesses to freely speak and quote from grand jury evidence, but not President Trump or his counsel,” they wrote.

    Prosecutors have cited Trump’s public attacks on Bragg and prosecution witness Michael Cohen, Trump’s former lawyer, as one reason to restrict what he could say. Trump’s attorneys contend that Bragg and former prosecutor Mark Pomerantz made “disparaging and obnoxious” comments about their client.

    Manhattan prosecutors have accused Trump of falsifying business records with the intent to conceal illegal conduct connected to his 2016 presidential campaign. The criminal charges stem from Bragg’s investigation into hush money payments, made during the 2016 campaign, to women who claimed they had extramarital affairs with Trump, which he denies. Trump has pleaded not guilty to all of the charges.

    Source link

  • Chinese police detain man for allegedly using ChatGPT to spread rumors online | CNN Business

    Chinese police detain man for allegedly using ChatGPT to spread rumors online | CNN Business


    Hong Kong
    CNN
     — 

    Police in China have detained a man they say used ChatGPT to create fake news and spread it online, in what state media has called the country’s first criminal case related to the AI chatbot.

    According to a statement from police in the northwest province of Gansu, the suspect allegedly used ChatGPT to generate a bogus report about a train crash, which he then posted online for profit. The article received about 15,000 views, the police said in Sunday’s statement.

    ChatGPT, developed by Microsoft

    (MSFT)    -backed OpenAI, is banned in China, though internet users can use virtual private networks (VPN) to access it.

    Train crashes have been a sensitive issue in China since 2011, when authorities faced pressure to explain why state media had failed to provide timely updates on a bullet train collision in the city of Wenzhou that resulted in 40 deaths.

    Gansu authorities said the suspect, surnamed Hong, was questioned in the city of Dongguan in southern Guangdong province on May 5.

    “Hong used modern technology to fabricate false information, spreading it on the internet, which was widely disseminated,” the Gansu police said in the statement.

    “His behavior amounted to picking quarrels and provoking trouble,” they added, explaining the offense that Hong was accused of committing.

    Police said the arrest was the first in Gansu since China’s Cyberspace Administration enacted new regulations in January to rein in the use of deep fakes. State broadcaster CGTN says it was the country’s first arrest of a person accused of using ChatGPT to fabricate and spread fake news.

    Formally known as deep synthesis, deep fake refers to highly realistic textual and visual content generated by artificial intelligence.

    The new legislation bars users from generating deep fake content on topics already prohibited by existing laws on China’s heavily censored internet. It also outlines take down procedures for content considered false or harmful.

    The arrest also came amid a 100-day campaign launched by the internet branch of the Ministry of Public Security in March to crack down on the spread of internet rumors.

    Since the beginning of the year, Chinese internet giants such as Baidu

    (BIDU)     and Alibaba

    (BABA)    have sought to catch up with OpenAI, launching their own versions of the ChatGPT service.

    Baidu unveiled “Wenxin Yiyan” or “ERNIE Bot” in March. Two months later, Alibaba launched “Tongyi Qianwen,” which roughly translates as seeking truth by asking a thousand questions.

    In draft guidelines issued last month to solicit public feedback, China’s cyberspace regulator said generative AI services would be required to undergo security reviews before they can operate.

    Service providers will also be required to verify users’ real identities, as well as providing details about the scale and type of data they use, their basic algorithms and other technical information.

    Source link

  • Democratic congressman’s staff attacked by man with baseball bat | CNN Politics

    Democratic congressman’s staff attacked by man with baseball bat | CNN Politics



    CNN
     — 

    Virginia Democratic Rep. Gerry Connolly said two staffers were injured Monday by a man wielding a bat who came into his district office in Fairfax.

    Connolly told CNN that the assailant who entered his office and attacked two of his aides did so with a metal bat. The attacker struck one senior aide in the head with the metal bat, he said. The attacker also hit an intern – on her first day on the job – in the side with the bat.

    In a statement earlier Monday, Connolly said that both aides were taken to the hospital with non-life threatening injuries, and City of Fairfax Police Department arrested the man.

    Lawmakers on Capitol Hill facing unprecedented number of threats

    The suspect, whom US Capitol Police identified as 49-year-old Xuan Kha Tran Pham of Fairfax is facing charges for one count of aggravated malicious wounding and one count of malicious wounding, USCP stated.

    “At this time, it is not clear what the suspect’s motivation may have been,” USCP said in their statement. “Based on what we know right now, investigators do not have any information that the suspect was known to the USCP.”

    Pham suffers from schizophrenia, his father said in an interview with CNN, and had previously been charged with assaulting a law enforcement officer before the charge was subsequently dropped, records show.

    The attacker, who is a constituent from his district but who Connolly said he doesn’t know, caused wide damage in his office, shattering glass in a conference room and breaking computers along the way. “He was filled with out of control rage,” Connolly told CNN in a phone interview.

    Connolly said later Monday that the man had contacted his office in the past.

    “He had contacted our office, soliciting help on something, and my staff were helping him,” Connolly told CNN. “But there is no indication today that the two were related at all. And my staff did sense in talking to him that he engaged in bizarre statements. Never threatening, however.”

    The Virginia Democrat said he didn’t “think there’s a motivation” for the incident, adding: “I think we are talking about real mental illness.”

    Connolly said he was at a ribbon cutting at the time for a food bank when the assailant drove to his office and entered the building. The congressman estimates it took police about five minutes to respond to the emergency call for help.

    Neighbors identified Pham as a person captured on a home security camera Monday morning wielding a bat and chasing a woman in his neighborhood.

    The security video, provided to CNN by a homeowner who lives near the suspect, shows a woman screaming as she flees from the man with the bat. The recording was timestamped as occurring at 10:34 a.m., before the attack at the congressional office.

    A law enforcement source confirmed that prior to the attack in the congressional office, the suspect confronted a woman in Fairfax County. He damaged her vehicle with a baseball bat, the source said.

    Pham’s father, Hy Xuan Pham, told CNN his son is schizophrenic and hadn’t taken his medication for three months. He said that he last saw him Monday morning, and later heard from police that he had been arrested.

    “He is in a really bad condition,” the father said in an interview. “All day and all night, he mumbles … he talks and looks like he talks with someone in his brain, and suddenly, he is shouting angrily.”

    The suspect’s father said that he had tried to get his son mental health treatment but hadn’t been able to.

    Virginia court records show that Pham was previously charged in January 2022 in Fairfax with felony assault on a law enforcement officer, several charges of attempted disarmament of a law enforcement officer’s stun gun, and obstructing justice or resisting arrest. The case’s disposition was listed as “nolle prosequi,” which generally means that the district attorney declined to prosecute it. No further details about the case were immediately available Monday afternoon.

    Last year, someone with the same name and city of residence as Pham filed a federal lawsuit against the CIA, alleging in a short handwritten complaint that the agency was guilty of “wrongfully imprisoning me in a lower perspective based on physics called the book world since 1975,” and “brutally torturing me with a degenerating disability consistently since 1988 till the present from the fourth dimension.”

    The CIA moved to dismiss the case, which Pham filed without a lawyer, earlier this year, calling his claims “facially implausible.” The motion is pending.

    Monday’s attack comes amid a string of incidents where members of Congress, their staff and their families have been attacked in recent months.

    In March, a staffer for Republican Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky was stabbed in Washington, DC. In February, a man assaulted Democratic Rep. Angie Craig of Minnesota in the elevator of her apartment building also in Washington. In October, a man attacked Paul Pelosi, the husband of then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, hospitalizing him after hitting Paul Pelosi with a hammer in the couple’s home in San Francisco.

    Connolly said Monday that there needs to be more security funding for members’ offices in their districts.

    “I think we’re gonna have to reassess the security we provide or don’t provide district offices,” Connolly said. “So if you’re a member of Congress and your office happens to be in a federal building, in the courthouse, you’re gonna have security. But if you’re in a commercial office space like me, you have no security. None. And what could go wrong with that? Well, we learned the answer to that this morning.”

    This story has been updated with additional developments.

    Source link

  • Hot box detectors didn’t stop the East Palestine derailment. Research shows another technology might have | CNN

    Hot box detectors didn’t stop the East Palestine derailment. Research shows another technology might have | CNN



    CNN
     — 

    A failing, flaming wheel bearing doomed the rail car that derailed and created a catastrophe in East Palestine earlier this month, but researchers have offered a solution to the faulty detectors that experts say could have averted the disaster unfolding in the small Ohio town.

    These wayside hot box detectors, stationed on rail tracks every 20 miles or so, use infrared sensors to record the temperatures of railroad bearings as trains pass by. If they sense an overheated bearing, the detectors trigger an alarm, which notifies the train crew they should stop and inspect the rail car for a potential failure.

    So why did these detectors miss a bearing failure before the catastrophe?

    An investigation into hot box detectors published in 2019 and funded by the Department of Transportation found that one “major shortcoming” of these detectors is that they can’t distinguish between healthy and defective bearings, and temperature alone is not a good indicator of bearing health.

    “Temperature is reactive in nature, meaning by the time you’re sensing a high temperature in a bearing, it’s too late, the bearing is already in its final stages of failure,” Constantine Tarawneh, director of the University Transportation Center for Railways Safety (UTCRS) and lead investigator of the study, told CNN.

    As part of the investigation, the UTCRS researchers developed a new system to better detect a bearing issue long before a catastrophic failure. The key: measuring the bearing’s vibration in addition to its temperature and load.

    The vibration of a failing bearing, Tarawneh says, often begins intensifying thousands of miles before a catastrophic failure. So his team created sensors that can be placed on board each rail car, near the bearing, to continuously monitor its vibration throughout its travels.

    “If you put an accelerometer on a bearing and you’re monitoring the vibration levels, the minute a defect happens in the bearing, the accelerometer will sense an increase in vibration, and that could be, in many cases, up to 100,000 miles before the bearing actually fails,” he said.

    Tarawneh, who argues the technology should be federally mandated, says had it been on board Norfolk Southern’s line it would have prevented the derailment in East Palestine.

    “It would have detected the problem months before this happened,” he said. “There wouldn’t have been a derailment.”

    A preliminary report from the East Palestine derailment, released Thursday by the National Transportation Safety Board, found hot box sensors detected that a wheel bearing was heating up miles before it eventually failed and caused the train to derail. But the detectors didn’t alert the crew until it was too late.

    The bearing, according to the report, was 38 degrees above ambient temperature when it passed through a hot box 30 miles outside East Palestine. No alert went out, the NTSB said.

    Ten miles later, the next hot box detected that the bearing had reached 103 degrees above ambient. Video of the train recorded in that area shows sparks and flames around the rail car. Still, no alert went to the crew.

    It wasn’t until a further 20 miles down the tracks, as the train reached East Palestine, that a hot box detector recorded the bearing’s temperature at 253 degrees above ambient and sent an alarm message instructing the crew to slow and stop the train to inspect a hot axle, the report said.

    The crew slowed the train, the report added, leading to an automatic emergency brake application. After the train stopped, the crew observed the derailment.

    The reason those first two hot box readings didn’t trigger an alert, the report said, is because Norfolk Southern’s policy is to only stop and inspect a bearing after it has reached 170 degrees above ambient temperature. The NTSB is planning to review Norfolk Southern’s use of wayside hot box detectors, including spacing and the temperature threshold that determines when crews are alerted.

    “Had there been a detector earlier, that derailment may not have occurred,” said NTSB Chair Jennifer Homendy at a Thursday press conference.

    In a statement responding to the NTSB report, Norfolk Southern stressed that its hot box detectors were operating as designed, and that those detectors trigger an alarm at a temperature threshold that is “among the lowest in the rail industry.” CNN has reached out to Norfolk Southern for comment on vibration sensor technology.

    Hot box detectors are unregulated, so companies like Norfolk Southern can turn them on and off at their own discretion and choose the temperature threshold at which crews receive an alert.

    There are several causes for overheated roller bearings, including fatigue cracking, water damage, mechanical damaging, a loose bearing or a wheel defect, according to the NTSB, and the agency says they’re investigating what caused the failure in East Palestine.

    “Roller bearings fail, but it is absolutely critical for problems to be identified and addressed early so these aren’t run until failure,” Homendy said. “You cannot wait until they’ve failed. Problems need to be identified early, so something catastrophic like this does not occur again.”

    Hum Industrial Technology, a rail car telematics company, has licensed the vibration sensor technology created by Tarawneh and his team. And it has launched pilot programs with several rail companies. But at this point, those sensors are on very few trains operating in the United States, which Tarawneh largely blames on the cost of retrofitting and monitoring cars and what he sees as companies prioritizing profit.

    It’s not clear exactly what it would cost to retrofit every train car in operation with sensors today, but Hum Industrial Technology stressed that it would cost less to put a sensor on a bearing than to replace a bearing.

    “They see it as, well, why should we do it if it’s not mandated?” Tarawneh said. “It’s like a lot of people are saying, ‘well, I’m willing to take the risk. It’s not that many derailments per year.’”

    But Steve Ditmeyer, a former Federal Railroad Administration official, says equipping every rail car with on board sensors may not be financially feasible.

    “What they’re proposing will work, but it’s very, very expensive,” Ditmeyer told CNN. “And one does have to take cost into consideration.”

    It would take more than 12 million on board sensors, according to Tarawneh, to fully equip the roughly 1.6 million rail cars in service across North America.

    Ditmeyer says railroads should invest more heavily in wayside acoustic bearing detectors, which sit along the tracks – much like hot box detectors – and monitor the sound of passing trains. They listen for noise that indicates a bearing failure well before a potential catastrophe.

    As of 2019, only 39 acoustic bearing detectors were in use across North America compared to more than 6,000 hot box detectors, according to a 2019 DOT report.

    “They are the only way that I can think of that would have prevented the accident by having caught a failing bearing earlier,” Ditmeyer said.

    Source link

  • FBI investigating ‘suspicious death’ of woman on Carnival cruise ship | CNN

    FBI investigating ‘suspicious death’ of woman on Carnival cruise ship | CNN



    CNN
     — 

    The FBI is investigating the “suspicious death” of a female passenger onboard the Carnival Sunshine cruise ship, the agency announced in a news release Sunday.

    The woman was found unresponsive during the ship’s February 27 voyage to Nassau, Bahamas, the FBI field office in Columbia, South Carolina, said.

    Medical staff and crew members attempted life-saving measures after learning she was unresponsive, but the woman was pronounced dead on the ship, the FBI said.

    “Both the deceased and her husband were debarked in Nassau and Bahamian authorities have already investigated the circumstances and are conducting an autopsy,” Carnival Cruise Line spokesperson Matt Lupoli said in a statement to CNN.

    “We are fully cooperating. This is a matter for authorities in the Bahamas and Charleston and we have no further comments,” said Lupoli.

    On March 4, when the ship returned to Charleston, an FBI team processed the passenger’s room for evidence, the FBI release states.

    The incident was isolated and there wasn’t a threat to any other passengers before or after the woman was found dead, the FBI said.

    The FBI investigates suspicious deaths of US nationals as well as “certain crimes on the high seas,” the release states.

    The incident remains under investigation, the FBI said.

    Source link