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Tag: domestic alerts

  • China to clamp down on AirDrop and Bluetooth file sharing for national security reasons | CNN Business

    China to clamp down on AirDrop and Bluetooth file sharing for national security reasons | CNN Business

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    Hong Kong
    CNN
     — 

    China’s cyberspace regulator plans to issue new rules clamping down on the use of wireless file sharing functions such as Bluetooth and Apple’s AirDrop on national security grounds.

    The move comes after protesters in China used AirDrop during anti-government protests in October 2022 to share content, bypassing strict internet censorship. Weeks later, Apple moved to limit the use of the AirDrop function on devices in China.

    The draft proposal was issued earlier this week by the Cyberspace Administration of China, the powerful internet watchdog that reports to a body headed by leader Xi Jinping.

    The aim of the regulation is to “maintain national security and social public interests” by regulating the use of close-range wireless communication tools such as Bluetooth, Wi-Fi and other technologies, it said.

    People must not publish or share “illegal or harmful” information on such networks and should report violations to the regulator. Those who create or support such networks should require users to provide their real names and other personal information.

    The draft says service providers should conduct security assessments when launching any new apps or functions that are capable of “mobilizing the public” or enabling “public expression.”

    The regulator is seeking public feedback on the proposed rules until July 6.

    Other than AirDrop, Google’s Nearby Share allows users to transfer data between Android and Chrome OS devices via Bluetooth and Wi-Fi. Chinese phone makers Xiaomi, Vivo and Oppo also offer similar services.

    Last year, international media, including The New York Times and Vice World News, reported that some residents in China were using AirDrop to spread leaflets and images echoing slogans used in a rare protest against Xi on October 13. On that day, shortly before Xi secured a precedent-breaking third term, two banners were hung on an overpass of a major thoroughfare in the northwest of Beijing, protesting against Xi’s zero-Covid policy and authoritarian rule.

    And in 2019, AirDrop, which is effective only over short distances, was particularly popular among anti-government demonstrators in Hong Kong who regularly used the feature to drop colorful posters and artwork to subway passengers urging them to take part in protests.

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  • Biden kicks off reelection bid with union rally in Philadelphia | CNN Politics

    Biden kicks off reelection bid with union rally in Philadelphia | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    President Joe Biden kicked off his reelection campaign Saturday at a union rally in his frequent haunt of Pennsylvania, the state that remains an intersection of his personal and political identities that he hopes can propel him to a second term.

    The first official rally of his final political campaign was a moment for Biden to underscore recent economic wins that undergird his argument for another four years in the White House.

    “Just think back. Remember what it was like when I came to office, we came into office. Remember the mess we inherited,” Biden told the audience in Philadelphia. “Now look at where we are today.”

    To a roaring crowd, who repeatedly cheered “four more years,” the president touted several accomplishments, including the bipartisan infrastructure law, a coronavirus relief package, a bipartisan semiconductor chip manufacturing law and the recently negotiated debt ceiling deal that helped avert a US default.

    Biden also criticized recent Republican tax proposals while describing what he called his middle-class vision for the American economy, referring to it several times as “Biden-omics.”

    Biden made only brief mention of Donald Trump, the current front-runner for the 2024 GOP presidential nomination, steering clear of the former president’s recent federal indictment and arraignment but hitting him on infrastructure.

    “Under my predecessor, infrastructure week became a punchline,” Biden said. “On my watch, we’re making infrastructure a decade headline.”

    First lady Jill Biden, who spoke shortly before her husband, highlighted the president’s optimism. Wearing a corsage to mark their 46th wedding anniversary Saturday, the first lady recalled how she met Biden following the death of his first wife and baby daughter in a tragic car accident that also injured his two sons.

    “What I love about Joe is that even though he has faced unimaginable tragedies, his optimism is undaunted,” Jill Biden said. “His strength is unshakeable.”

    She added that the president was “not done.”

    “He’s ready to finish the job,” she said. “He’s ready to win, and with your help, he will.”

    Though his economic wins were the centerpiece of Biden’s opening campaign event, polls show many voters give him poor marks for his handling of the economy, particularly as prices have soared post-pandemic. Recent figures have shown inflation easing, however, and fears of an imminent recession have faded.

    Biden has said more Americans will come to reward him for his economic stewardship once the benefits of some of his signature legislative achievements, including a new infrastructure law, begin taking hold.

    Labor groups that threw their backing behind Biden ahead of his speech include the AFL-CIO, which said it was the earliest point in a presidential election cycle it had ever endorsed a candidate.

    “There’s absolutely no question that Joe Biden is the most pro-union president in our lifetimes,” said AFL-CIO President Liz Shuler. “From bringing manufacturing jobs home to America to protecting our pensions and making historic investments in infrastructure, clean energy and education, we’ve never seen a president work so tirelessly to rebuild our economy from the bottom up and middle out.”

    Supporters cheer before Biden speaks at the Pennsylvania Convention Center.

    Biden, who made his first stop after announcing his reelection bid a legislative conference for North America’s Building Trades Unions in Washington, has long relied on union support for his political ambitions.

    “I’m more honored by your endorsement than you can imagine – coming this early, it’s going to make a gigantic difference in this campaign,” Biden said during Saturday’s event in Philadelphia, where he called himself “the most pro-union president in American history.”

    Not all unions have thrown their support behind Biden’s reelection bid. The powerful United Auto Workers said last month it was holding off on endorsing Biden, citing concerns over his policies that would encourage a transition to electric vehicles, according to a memo from the union.

    The UAW has more than 400,000 members, and Biden has touted its support in the past. Last year he called American autoworkers “the most skilled autoworkers in the world.” The group’s membership is mostly concentrated in Michigan, a presidential election battleground.

    Biden also rankled union members last year when he signed legislation that averted a nationwide rail strike – a step he said was necessary to prevent a stoppage of important freight movement.

    Biden’s campaign has leaned into his economic record, including releasing a 60-second ad titled “Backbone” last month. The spot struck a populist tone, mixing audio of the president speaking about “investing in places and people that have been forgotten” and a narrator ticking through the administration’s work to boost infrastructure and manufacturing in the country.

    “Joe Biden’s building an economy that leaves no city, no town, no American behind,” the narrator says.

    This story has been updated with additional information.

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  • States accelerate efforts to block Chinese purchases of agricultural land | CNN Politics

    States accelerate efforts to block Chinese purchases of agricultural land | CNN Politics

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    Washington
    CNN
     — 

    A growing number of states are considering or have passed measures this legislative term to ban “foreign adversaries” and foreign entities – specifically China – from buying farmland.

    Proponents of the laws, mostly Republicans but some Democrats as well, have frequently cited concerns about food security and the need to protect military bases and other sensitive installations. But the moves have stoked anxieties among some experts on US-Chinese relations, including those who see echoes of past discriminatory laws in the United States like the Chinese Exclusion Act.

    Florida last month joined a list of at least seven other states – including Virginia, North Dakota, Montana and Arkansas – to pass variations of such bills this session, according to the National Agricultural Law Center (NALC), which is tracking the issue and conducts research on agricultural and food law. Similar measures are percolating in more than two dozen states and there’s a bill in Congress that seeks to federalize the issue, the NALC said.

    States have previously sought to limit foreign investment, said Micah Brown, a staff attorney at the NALC. What’s new, Brown says, is that some lawmakers are taking aim at specific countries and their governments.

    “2023 is really swinging for the fences here, with a majority of states having some kind of proposal, at least one proposal,” Brown told CNN.

    Of slightly more than 40 million acres of agricultural held by foreign investors in the United States, China held less than 1% of that land – or 383,935 acres – as of the end of 2021, according to a report from the US Department of Agriculture.

    Florida’s law, signed on May 8, prohibits most citizens from “foreign countries of concern” from purchasing land on or within 10 miles of any “military installation or critical infrastructure facility,” including seaports, airports and power plants. It was signed alongside a different bill that bans internet applications like TikTok on Florida government devices, a similar area of focus for state politicians who have concerns about Chinese influence.

    The foreign countries of concern that are named include China, Russia, Cuba, North Korea and Iran, along with agencies and governments operating on their behalf. In public remarks, governor and 2024 Republican presidential candidate Ron DeSantis repeatedly called out China.

    “Today, Florida makes it very clear: We don’t want the (Chinese Communist Party) in the Sunshine State. We want to maintain this as the ‘Free State of Florida.’ That’s exactly what these bills are doing,” DeSantis said at a bill signing in May.

    Following the bill’s passage, a group of Chinese citizens who live and work in Florida, along with a real estate company with primarily Chinese and Chinese-American clients, sued state officials, alleging the law would violate their equal protection and due process guarantees under the US Constitution. CNN has reached out to the governor’s office for comment.

    Virginia’s legislation doesn’t name China, though Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin has specifically cited the CCP in advocating for the new law. Montana’s applies to “foreign adversaries” as designated by the US Commerce Department, a list that includes China, Iran, North Korea and Russia.

    Brown said the 2023 laws are part of a larger “political flashpoint” prompted out of concerns over Chinese companies attempting to build agricultural sites near military bases in North Dakota and Texas. States including Arkansas and Indiana already had laws restricting certain foreign investments prior to this year’s legislative push.

    In North Dakota, a US subsidiary of Chinese company Fufeng Group attempted to build a wet corn milling plant in Grand Forks that would have sat near an Air Force base there and thus pose what the Department of the Air Force called a “significant threat to national security.”

    The head of Fufeng’s US operation denied the company has a “direct relationship” with the Chinese government in an interview with the Grand Forks Herald last year.

    “We’ve got lots of places in North Dakota they could have built that plant without being a security risk, but instead, they chose to buy land right next to an Air Force base,” North Dakota Republican state Rep. Lawrence Klemin, who co-sponsored the state’s bill, told CNN. “We’ve got two Air Force bases in North Dakota, and we’ve got lots of places where we don’t have them, so why didn’t they do that?” Klemin’s bill was signed in April.

    Texas is also considering a bill that would bar “hostile nations including China,” in the state from purchasing real property, like agricultural land, as Republican State. Sen. Lois Kolkhorst describes her legislation. The bill initially ignited controversy because it would have barred citizens of China and other adversarial countries from buying land in the state, though the bill was later amended to clarify that it would not apply to lawful permanent residents, US citizens and dual citizens and to include an exception for property considered “residence homestead.”

    Several experts on US-China relations with whom CNN spoke warned against knee-jerk responses and called for lawmakers to act on evidence, not suspicion.

    “I think there’s a good reason to want to keep control of strategic interests in one’s own country … but these bills about farmland, these bills about just property in general, to me, it’s transparent that they’re rooted in racism and xenophobia again because we’ve seen this before. It really isn’t the first time,” said Nancy Qian, a professor of economics at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management who has conducted research on US exclusion laws.

    Yan Bennett, the assistant director of the Paul and Marcia Wythes Center on Contemporary China at Princeton University, noted that US farmland is appealing for China because the country has food security issues and does not have enough arable land for cultivation.

    “When national security is threatened, yes, we need to take action,” Bennett told CNN. “But not every land purchase by a foreign government or a foreign national is a national security threat, so we need to make sure that we distinguish those purchases from those that are actual threats.”

    An atmosphere of racism and anti-China sentiment threatens other US interests as well, such as possibly deterring Chinese students from wanting to come to the US and obtain advanced degrees, explained Robert Daly, the director of the Kissinger Institute on China and the United States at the Wilson Center.

    “If we’re not careful that we are telling the world’s biggest talent pool that they’re an unwelcomed class or a reviled class here in the United States and that will also have implications for Chinese Americans,” Daly told CNN in February. “Real demonstrable security threats have to be met as such. I’m not saying that the Chinese Communist Party does not have plans and intentions that harm America’s interests – it does, and we need to go after those – but based on evidence.”

    In response to efforts in Texas and other states that are considering barring some Chinese citizens from owning US land over national security concerns, China’s Foreign Ministry spokesperson said earlier this year that trade between the two countries is “mutually beneficial.”

    “To overstretch the concept of national security and politicize economic, trade and investment issues runs counter to the principles of market economy and international trade rules, which undercuts international confidence in the US market environment,” spokesperson Mao Ning said at a news briefing in February.

    Virginia state Sen. Ryan McDougle, a Republican and co-sponsor of his state’s new law, dismissed what he called “ridiculous” concerns about his bill perpetuating racism against Asian-Americans, telling CNN in February it is “focused on a country that has established hostility to the United States.”

    In the near future, the Chinese spy balloon incident earlier this year will prompt increased attention to “the challenges that we are seeing from the CCP” – and thus the issue of Chinese farmland purchases in the US, predicted Rep. Dan Newhouse, a Washington Republican. The longtime China critic is sponsoring a bill in Congress that would that would ban the purchase of public or private agricultural land in the US by foreign nationals linked to the Chinese government.

    “I think people are waking up to the fact that we need to be more aware of what’s going on and prevent something happening that we don’t want to see,” Newhouse said.

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  • Georgia state election board investigation clears Fulton County of 2020 election wrongdoing | CNN Politics

    Georgia state election board investigation clears Fulton County of 2020 election wrongdoing | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    The Georgia State Election Board dismissed the years-long investigation into alleged misconduct by Fulton County election workers during the 2020 election, saying it had found no evidence of conspiracy.

    “Over the course of the investigation, it was confirmed that numerous allegations made against the Fulton County Department of Registration and Elections, and specifically, two election workers, were false and unsubstantiated,” according to a press release from Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger’s office.

    Former President Donald Trump and his campaign had targeted Fulton County election workers at State Farm Arena in Atlanta by baselessly claiming they were counting fake mail-in ballots during the 2020 election.

    The investigation – conducted by Georgia Secretary of State investigators, along with the Georgia Bureau of Investigation and Federal Bureau of Investigation special agents – concluded that “there was no evidence of any type of fraud as alleged.”

    The attorney representingformer election workers Wandrea “Shaye” Moss and her mother Ruby Freeman said his clients had been “collateral damage” in an effort to subvert the presidential election.

    “This serves as further evidence that Ms. Freeman and Ms. Moss – while doing their patriotic duty and serving their community – were simply collateral damage in a coordinated effort to undermine the results of the 2020 presidential election. Lies about Ms. Freeman and Ms. Moss have been proven false over and over again, and those who perpetuate them should be held accountable,” attorney Von DuBose said.

    A team representing Trump presented heavily edited video before Georgia lawmakers in a December 2020 state Senate hearing that purportedly showed election workers producing “suitcases” of illegal ballots, according to court filings. That allegation was investigated by state election officials and quickly proven to be false.

    Tuesday’s announcement echoes that there was no wrongdoing committed by election officials in Fulton County.

    According to the Georgia Secretary of State’s office, “three law enforcement agencies reviewed the entire unedited video footage of the events in question surrounding [the two election workers] at State Farm Arena,” and that “all allegations made against [the two election workers] were unsubstantiated and found to have no merit.”

    “We remain diligent and dedicated to looking into real claims of voter fraud,” Raffensperger said. “We are glad the State Election Board finally put this issue to rest. False claims and knowingly false allegations made against these election workers have done tremendous harm. Election workers deserve our praise for being on the front lines.”

    Citing significant improvements in Fulton County elections, the State Election Board on Tuesday also unanimously voted to end an attempted state takeover of the county’s election board, a review that was implemented after lawmakers requested it under Georgia’s 2021 voting law.

    This story has been updated with additional details.

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  • YouTube removed video of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. for violating vaccine misinformation policy | CNN Business

    YouTube removed video of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. for violating vaccine misinformation policy | CNN Business

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    New York
    CNN
     — 

    YouTube said on Monday that it had removed a video of presidential hopeful Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. being interviewed by podcast host Jordan Peterson for violating its policy prohibiting vaccine misinformation.

    A YouTube spokesperson told CNN that the platform removed the video from Peterson’s channel because it does not allow “content that alleges that vaccines cause chronic side effects, outside of rare side effects that are recognized by health authorities.”

    The platform’s latest move comes as Kennedy, an environmental lawyer and anti-vaccine activist, has gained more mainstream attention with his views and recently had his account reinstated on Instagram as a result of his long-shot presidential campaign.

    YouTube began cracking down broadly on vaccine misinformation in 2021, following an earlier policy preventing false or misleading claims about Covid-19. At the time, YouTube said it would remove the channels of “several well-known vaccine misinformation spreaders,” including one belonging to the Children’s Health Defense, a group affiliated with Kennedy. (The YouTube channel for Kennedy’s presidential campaign remains active.)

    Under its policy, YouTube removes false claims about currently administered vaccines that the World Health Organization and local authorities have approved and confirmed to be safe.

    Although YouTube removed the video, it remains available on Twitter, showing the fractured approach to vaccine misinformation across the internet as his campaign gets underway.

    In a tweet on Sunday, Kennedy noted YouTube’s removal of the video saying, “What do you think … Should social media platforms censor presidential candidates?”

    Kennedy also gained attention for his anti-vaccine views on a different podcast this week.

    On Monday, prominent vaccine scientist Peter Hotez said he was accosted outside of his home after a Twitter exchange with podcaster Joe Rogan, who challenged Hotez to debate Kennedy over the weekend.

    Hotez had tweeted in support of a Vice article criticizing Spotify’s handling of vaccine misinformation in an interview with Kennedy on Rogan’s show. After Twitter owner Elon Musk and hedge fund manager Bill Ackman weighed in, Hotez said he was “stalked in front of my home by a couple of antivaxxers.”

    Kennedy suggested to Hotez that they have a “respectful, congenial, informative debate.” Hotez said he would go on Rogan’s podcast but would not debate Kennedy.

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  • OpenAI, maker of ChatGPT, hit with proposed class action lawsuit alleging it stole people’s data | CNN Business

    OpenAI, maker of ChatGPT, hit with proposed class action lawsuit alleging it stole people’s data | CNN Business

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    CNN
     — 

    OpenAI, the company behind the viral ChatGPT tool, has been hit with a lawsuit alleging the company stole and misappropriated vast swaths of peoples’ data from the internet to train its AI tools.

    The proposed class action lawsuit, filed Wednesday in a California federal court, claims that OpenAI secretly scraped “massive amounts of personal data from the internet,” according to the complaint. The nearly 160-page complaint alleges that this personal data, including “essentially every piece of data exchanged on the internet it could take,” was also seized by the company without notice, consent or “just compensation.”

    Moreover, this data scraping occurred at an “unprecedented scale,” the suit claims.

    OpenAI did not immediately respond to CNN’s request for comment Wednesday. Microsoft, a major investor into OpenAI, was also named as a defendant in the suit and did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

    “By collecting previously obscure personal data of millions and misappropriating it to develop a volatile, untested technology, OpenAI put everyone in a zone of risk that is incalculable – but unacceptable by any measure of responsible data protection and use,” Timothy K. Giordano, a partner at Clarkson, the law firm behind the suit, said in a statement to CNN Wednesday.

    The complaint also claims that OpenAI products “use stolen private information, including personally identifiable information, from hundreds of millions of internet users, including children of all ages, without their informed consent or knowledge.”

    The lawsuit seeks injunctive relief in the form of a temporary freeze on further commercial use of OpenAI’s products. It also seeks payments of “data dividends” as financial compensation to people whose information was used to develop and train OpenAI’s tools.

    OpenAI publicly launched ChatGPT late last year, and the tool immediately went viral for its ability to generate compelling, human-sounding responses to user prompts. The success of ChatGPT spurred an apparent AI arms race in the tech world, as companies big and small are now racing to develop and deploy AI tools into as many products as possible.

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  • Biden has already canceled $66 billion in student loans. Here’s how 3 people received debt relief | CNN Politics

    Biden has already canceled $66 billion in student loans. Here’s how 3 people received debt relief | CNN Politics

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    Washington
    CNN
     — 

    Even though the Supreme Court struck down President Joe Biden’s student loan forgiveness program, more debt will be canceled during his time in office than under any other president.

    The Biden administration has already canceled a record $66 billion in student loan debt for nearly 2.2 million borrowers.

    While his one-time student loan forgiveness program would have been far reaching, promising up to $20,000 of debt cancellation for eligible borrowers and wiping out roughly $400 billion overall, the Department of Education has made some lesser-known changes to existing student loan forgiveness programs.

    The administration has made it easier for people to qualify for the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program, which grants relief for public sector workers after they’ve made 10 years of qualifying payments.

    It has also made more people eligible for the borrower defense to repayment program that cancels student loan debt for borrowers who attended a school that may have misled them or violated certain state laws, as well as made loan discharges automatic for more borrowers who are permanently disabled.

    Here’s how three people received student loan forgiveness due to the changes the Biden administration has made to existing federal programs.

    Margo Myles, 52, got a letter from the Department of Education in late March saying that nearly $25,000 of her federal student loan debt had been canceled.

    Myles had borrowed the money in the early 2000s to earn an associate degree in paralegal studies, but the education didn’t pay off. She found work in the legal field a few years after finishing school but was earning just $9 an hour – not enough to pay her bills and her student loans.

    “I was trying to reorganize my life. For me, and for so many other students, this should have been a door,” Myles said of her degree program.

    Instead, she defaulted on her student loans. The default dinged her credit and resulted in the garnishment of her federal tax refunds. Myles said she wasn’t allowed to request her academic transcript while her loans were in default, preventing her from enrolling elsewhere.

    The Department of Education later found that schools owned by the now-defunct Corinthian Colleges – which include Myles’ alma mater, known at the time as Florida Metropolitan University – engaged in “widespread and pervasive misrepresentations” about students’ employment prospects, including guarantees they would find a job as well as the ability to transfer credits.

    Under the borrower defense program, borrowers can apply for debt relief if they were misled by their college. Last June, the Department of Education announced that any student who attended a Corinthian-owned college would automatically qualify for the benefit. The move made 560,000 more borrowers eligible.

    About nine months later, Myles learned that she was one of the qualifying borrowers and her debt was discharged. The Department of Education said it would request credit reporting agencies to repair her credit within 45 days, according to the letter she received.

    Myles, who now lives in Cheyenne, Wyoming, and works in insurance, plans to continue her education by pursuing a bachelor’s degree and then a law degree.

    “I’ve always wanted to go back to school. I don’t care if I’m 60 when I finish,” she said.

    Paige Vass recently qualified for the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program.

    Applying for the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program was a yearslong, frustrating process for Paige Vass, a special education teacher in Virginia.

    The PSLF program cancels remaining federal student loan debt for eligible government and nonprofit workers after they have made 120 qualifying monthly payments, which takes at least 10 years.

    But the program has been riddled with problems. Many people reached 10 years of repayment believing they qualified for cancellation of their remaining debt, but instead found out that they had the wrong kind of loan or were making payments in the wrong kind of repayment plan.

    Vass applied after teaching for more than 10 years, but her paperwork was returned several times, for things like having an incorrect date or a signature in the wrong place.

    She decided to try applying one more time last year after the Biden administration temporarily expanded eligibility for the program with a one-year waiver.

    “My fingers were crossed, but I also thought I might be chasing a unicorn,” Vass, 47, said.

    “But I was like, I’ve got to try. This is a huge debt and a huge weight on our family,” she added. She and her husband, who is also an educator, have two children.

    This spring, not only did Vass find out that she qualified for more than $30,000 in debt relief, but she is also set to receive a refund of about $5,000 because she had overpaid. Under the rules of the temporary waiver, she had made more payments than the 120 required for debt forgiveness.

    The debt relief means she may be able to spend more time with her kids. In the past, when she’s owed hundreds of dollars for her student debt each month, she’s worked summer school, taught skiing and worked for the on-demand delivery company DoorDash for some extra cash.

    “There’s been so many changes and so many hardships for teachers over the last three years. To me (the loan forgiveness) felt like a statement on behalf of our country’s administration that says, ‘You are valuable and we appreciate what you do, and you do make a difference,’” Vass said.

    Charles Goldenberg saw more than $340,000 of his debt canceled.

    Last year, Charles Goldenberg, a radiologist in New York City, got an email notifying him that his more than $340,000 in federal student loan debt had been canceled because he qualified for the PSLF program.

    While in training, and making little money, Goldenberg was paying off his loans through an income-driven repayment plan, which lowered his monthly payments. But those payments hardly covered the interest accumulation, and his balance ballooned before the pandemic pause went into effect in 2020.

    Now, at 42, Goldenberg said the student debt cancellation gives him the opportunity to move on with his life.

    “And I think that’s the whole point of the PSLF program. You spend years of training and schooling above and beyond college, making less money than you would when you’re out of training. It’s not without sacrifice. It’s because you work for eligible employers … where you’re not going to be making the kind of money that I make now,” he added.

    Goldenberg had been paying off some his loans for 19 years, but not every payment had counted toward the PSLF program until he consolidated his loans about two years ago.

    Thanks to the one-year waiver put in place by the Biden administration, some payments he made earlier became eligible.

    Applying for the relief had also been a long process for Goldenberg. His loan servicer had difficulty verifying that one of his employers, a nonprofit hospital in Miami, qualified for the program. He eventually found proof on the Department of Education’s website that the hospital did qualify.

    Now that Goldenberg is done with training and is earning more money, his student loan payments would be much higher when the pandemic-related pause ends later this year than they were three years ago. He expects they would be $2,500 or more a month if not for the debt relief.

    “Now I can use the money that I make for myself, for a mortgage, for family, for other expenses, for retirement. So it really opened up my financial future in a big way,” he said.

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  • States have been on a tax-cutting spree, but revenues are now weakening | CNN Politics

    States have been on a tax-cutting spree, but revenues are now weakening | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    Fueled by surging revenues, states have been slashing taxes for individuals and businesses for the past three years.

    But the party is expected to come to an end in the coming fiscal year, which started on Saturday in 46 states. Revenue is projected to decline by 0.7% in fiscal 2024, based on forecasts used in governors’ budgets, after an estimated 0.3% dip this fiscal year, according to a recently released National Association of State Budget Officers survey.

    This reversal comes after double-digit percentage increases for the prior two fiscal years. It reflects the impact of slower economic growth, a weaker stock market and a slew of recent tax cuts.

    Some 25 states have cut individual income tax rates since 2021, according to the right-leaning Tax Foundation. This includes 22 states that reduced their top marginal rates.

    “Most states are viewing tax reform and relief as a chance to, first and foremost, return some of their excess revenue to taxpayers, but to also do that in a way that is simultaneously improving the structure of their tax cuts and make it more conducive to long-term economic growth,” said Katherine Loughead, senior policy analyst at the foundation.

    States are also seeking to make themselves more attractive to business investment, as well as to remote and traditional workers, she continued.

    In 2023 alone, at least eight states approved rate reductions, according to the Tax Foundation. Arkansas, for instance, is trimming its top individual income tax rate to 4.7%, retroactive to January 1, after reducing it from 5.5% to 4.9% last year.

    Likewise, Montana lawmakers approved deepening cuts enacted in 2021. Starting in 2024, the top marginal income tax rate will be 5.9%, instead of 6.5% as originally planned. It was 6.9% in 2021.

    In addition, previously scheduled or triggered income tax rate reductions took effect this year in Arizona, Idaho, Iowa, Missouri and North Carolina, as well as for interest and dividend income in New Hampshire, according to the Tax Foundation.

    Aside from individual income tax cuts, states have also lowered the levies on purchases and for businesses over the past three years. Two states cut sales tax rates, while 13 reduced corporate income tax rates and others made additional tax changes that benefited companies.

    In 2023, Nebraska and Utah adopted corporate income tax rate reductions. The former will phase down its top rate to 3.99% in 2027, accelerating an earlier law’s timetable. If fully implemented as planned, Nebraska will slash its top marginal corporate income tax rate nearly in half over six years, according to the Tax Foundation.

    Utah also further reduced its corporate income tax rate to 4.65%, retroactive to January 1. A law passed last year had cut it to 4.85% for 2022, down from 4.95%.

    The tax cuts, along with stock market declines and the shaky economy, have taken their toll on states’ revenues, however.

    State tax revenue fell in 37 states, after adjusting for inflation, between July 2022 and May 2023, according to Lucy Dadayan, principal research associate at the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center. Some 19 states saw declines before taking inflation into account.

    Revenue dropped nearly 12% over the period on an inflation-adjusted basis. All major sources of revenue – personal income, sales and corporate income taxes – declined, though the extent varies widely by state and source. Individual income taxes were the weakest, plummeting more than 22%.

    States are in trouble, though there won’t be an immediate crisis, she said. Much depends on factors that remain unknown, such as whether the nation will fall into a recession or whether states will face natural disasters.

    The robust revenue of recent years was “artificially boosted” by federal Covid-19 pandemic relief funds and the strong stock market in 2021, she said.

    “We knew this is temporary,” Dadayan said. “It would have been better if the states wouldn’t jump and do tax cuts and be more cautious.”

    Still, revenues in fiscal 2023 are coming in stronger than initially expected. The current estimates are outperforming earlier forecasts by 6.5%, according to the National Association of State Budget Officers. Most states have also built up big reserves in their rainy day funds in recent years.

    Whether states will continue cutting taxes in the coming fiscal year will depend on what happens with revenues.

    “A lot of states have done what they can already,” Loughead said. “They will continue to look at how revenues come in and how the rates measure up. If they still are experiencing strong surpluses, I do think they might tweak those rates down even more.”

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  • Attorney disciplinary committee recommends Rudy Giuliani be disbarred for 2020 election legal work | CNN Politics

    Attorney disciplinary committee recommends Rudy Giuliani be disbarred for 2020 election legal work | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    An attorney disciplinary committee has recommended Rudy Giuliani be disbarred in Washington, DC, for his efforts on behalf of then-President Donald Trump to overturn the 2020 election results.

    The committee, which weighs cases of legal ethics and attorney misconduct in the District of Columbia, issued the report and recommendation on Giuliani on Friday following a lawyer misconduct hearing for Giuliani in December that functioned like a trial.

    “He claimed massive election fraud but had no evidence of it,” the committee wrote. “By prosecuting that destructive case Mr. Giuliani, a sworn officer of the Court, forfeited his right to practice law. He should be disbarred.”

    The panel’s recommendation is not final; the case against Giuliani still must be considered by DC’s Board on Professional Responsibility and by the DC court of appeals.

    The committee specifically criticized Giuliani for dishonesty following the 2020 election and what they called “calculated” attempts to undermine trust in elections, when he falsely claimed in a Pennsylvania federal court there had been election fraud that could overturn Joe Biden’s win of the state.

    “Mr. Giuliani has not acknowledged or accepted responsibility for his misconduct. To the contrary, he has declared his indignation over being subjected to the disciplinary process,” the committee wrote in its report. “We are convinced that a sanction must be enhanced to ensure that it adequately deters both Respondent (Giuliani) and other attorneys from acting similarly in the future.”

    The three-person committee, comprised of two attorneys and a member of the public, was unanimous in recommending Giuliani be disbarred.

    Ted Goodman, a political adviser to Giuliani, called the report a “great injustice,” and said “the decision-makers at the DC Bar Association are nothing more than an arm of the permanent regime in Washington.”

    Giuliani’s attorneys had argued to the committee that he had a reasonable basis to believe the claims in litigation were true and that he was relying on what others working with the Trump campaign told him about the fraud allegations.

    Giuliani, the former top federal prosecutor in Manhattan and a lawyer for Trump, is also facing an attorney ethics review in New York. His law license at this time is temporarily suspended, marking a substantial downfall for the once highly regarded American political and legal figurehead.

    “We have considered in mitigation Mr. Giuliani’s conduct following the September 11 attacks as well as his prior service in the Justice Department and as Mayor of New York City. But all of that happened long ago,” the report said on Friday. “The misconduct here sadly transcends all his past accomplishments.”

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  • Tired of Elon Musk? Here are the Twitter alternatives you should know about | CNN Business

    Tired of Elon Musk? Here are the Twitter alternatives you should know about | CNN Business

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    CNN
     — 

    When Elon Musk took over Twitter in October and began upending the platform, there weren’t many viable alternatives for frustrated users. Now, there may be too many.

    A growing number of services have launched or gained traction in recent months by appealing to users who are uncomfortable with Musk’s decisions to slash Twitter’s staff, overhaul the verification process, reinstate numerous incendiary accounts and most recently impose temporary read limits on tweets.

    Bluesky, Mastodon and Spill are among the many social apps vying for users over the last several months, with services that look and feel strikingly similar to Twitter. But now this increasingly crowded marketplace may be disrupted by the most dominant social media company: Meta.

    Meta’s Twitter clone, Threads, launched Wednesday and amassed more than 70 million sign-ups as of Friday morning thanks to a decision to tie the app to Instagram. Its user base is already far more than newer rivals and puts Threads on pace to rapidly catch up to Twitter, which had 238 million active users last year before Musk took the company private.

    In interviews, some other Twitter competitors took jabs at Meta’s effort and expressed confidence in their ability to grow and maintain an audience, even if it ends up being much smaller than what Mark Zuckerberg’s company can attract.

    “Threads leans heavily on celebrities and people with large Instagram followings, and therefore risks being more of a megaphone for the established, rather than something for everyone,” Sarah Oh, a former Twitter employee and founder of rival app T2, told CNN in an email.

    Spill co-founder and CEO Alphonzo Terrell said the company is “thrilled to see so much innovation in the social space” and remains “confident in our roadmap.”

    Here’s what you should know about the current crop of services trying to take on Twitter.

    Threads is Meta’s long-anticipated answer to Twitter and the biggest threat to the social network Musk bought for $44 billion. Threads is intended to offer a space for real-time conversations online, a function that has long been Twitter’s core selling point, and it’s doing so in part by adoption many of Twitter’s most recognizable features.

    The app has already attracted a long list of celebrities, brands and other VIP users, as well as many who clearly appear to be frustrated with Musk’s Twitter. And Zuckerberg isn’t just looking to catch up to Twitter; he wants to build a service that’s far larger.

    “It’ll take some time, but I think there should be a public conversations app with 1 billion+ people on it. Twitter has had the opportunity to do this but hasn’t nailed it,” Zuckerberg wrote on Threads. “Hopefully we will.”

    Launched by former Twitter employees, Spill says it strives to be a “visual conversation at the speed of culture.”

    The site is visual heavy and pushes GIFs, memes and video, making it more of a destination for creative communities. Spill has also emerged as a haven for Black Twitter users and marginalized communities seeking a safe space online.

    While the traction for Threads was unique, Spill has gained recently, too. Last weekend, amid renewed chaos at Twitter over the read limits, Spill gained “hundreds of thousands of new users,” according to Terrell, the CEO.

    T2, another service created by former Twitter employees, offers a social feed of posts with 280-character limits. The key selling point that sets it apart from others is its focus on safety, according to Oh, the founder.

    “We really do want to create an experience that allows people to share what they want to share without fearing risk of things like abuse and harassment, and we feel like we’re really well positioned to deliver on that,” Oh told CNN in February.

    In a statement this week, Oh doubled down on safety as a possible differentiator with Threads as well, raising the question of whether Meta had “learned from their past mistakes” after years of scrutiny on its struggles to police its own platforms.

    Bluesky, a service backed by Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, looks identical to Twitter, with one key difference. The app runs on a decentralized network, which provides users more control over how the service is run, the data is stored, and the content is moderated.

    Bluesky was formed independently of Twitter while Dorsey was serving as CEO but it was funded by the company until it became an independent organization in February 2022. In a tweet introducing the idea in 2019, Dorsey said it also plans to “build an open community around it, inclusive of companies & organizations, researchers, civil society leaders,” but warned “this isn’t going to happen overnight.”

    This week, Dorsey appeared to acknowledge that the market is now flooded with “Twitter clones.”

    Also built on decentralized networks, Mastodon launched before Musk took over Twitter but skyrocketed in popularity after the acquisition.

    Mastodon lets users join a slew of different servers run by various groups and individuals, rather than one central platform controlled by a single company like Twitter or Instagram. Mastodon is also free of ads. It’s developed by a nonprofit run by Eugen Rochko, who created Mastodon in 2016.

    After joining, users pick a server, with options from general-interest servers such as mastodon.world; regional servers like sfba.social, which is aimed at people in the San Francisco Bay Area; and ones aimed at various interests (many servers review new sign-ups before approving them.)

    Launched publicly in June 2022, Cohost offers a text-based social media feed with followers, reposts, likes and comments, similar to Twitter. However, the product is chronologically based with no ads, no trending topics and no displayed interactions (think hidden like counts and follower lists).

    Part of Cohost’s goal is to create a less hostile space for open dialogue, according to the website.

    “People who hear ‘Facebook has a Twitter replacement now!’ and don’t immediately run for the hills are unlikely to be interested in anything we’re doing,” said Jae Kaplan, co-founder of anti-software software club, the company that develops cohost. “We’re in separate market niches. I doubt they’re going to do anything to try and appeal to our users, and we’re not going to do anything to try and appeal to their users.”

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  • US-Israeli citizen charged with arms trafficking, acting as Chinese agent | CNN Politics

    US-Israeli citizen charged with arms trafficking, acting as Chinese agent | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    US prosecutors unsealed an indictment Monday charging the co-director of a think tank with illicit arms trafficking, violating US sanctions laws, and other charges, five months after he was arrested in Cyprus and fled from authorities.

    The US-Israeli citizen, Gal Luft, co-director of the Institute for the Analysis of Global Security, is also someone House Oversight Chairman James Comer, a top Republican, has described as an informant claiming to have incriminating information on Hunter Biden.

    Luft has tweeted denials of the allegations, saying in February, “I’ve been arrested in Cyprus on a politically motivated extradition request by the US. The US, claiming I’m an arms dealer. It would be funny if it weren’t tragic. I’ve never been an arms dealer. DOJ is trying to bury me to protect Joe, Jim&Hunter Biden.”

    An attorney for Luft did not immediately respond to a request for comment. CNN has reached out to the Institute for the Analysis of Global Security.

    Luft is a fugitive, prosecutors say.

    Luft was charged with failing to register as an agent for China in the US, including in 2016 acting through a former high-ranking US official who was then advising President-elect Donald Trump. He was also charged with acting as a middleman to aid Chinese companies buying weapons. The indictment also alleges Luft violated US sanctions by attempting to broker sales of Iranian oil.

    House Republicans are investigating the Biden family’s financial dealings and have requested information from the Justice Department about its investigation into Hunter Biden, who has agreed to plead guilty to two tax misdemeanors. At least one Republican, Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, has claimed that Luft is an important witness in that investigation.

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  • Legendary computer hacker Kevin Mitnick dies at 59 | CNN Business

    Legendary computer hacker Kevin Mitnick dies at 59 | CNN Business

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    CNN
     — 

    Kevin Mitnick, one of the most famous hackers in the history of cybersecurity, died over the weekend at age 59 after a more than year-long battle with pancreatic cancer, his family said in a published obituary.

    Before his death on July 16, Mitnick’s hacking sprees were legendary, and multiple films were inspired by him.

    The first, “WarGames” starring Matthew Broderick, was partially based on allegations that Mitnick successfully hacked the computer systems at North American Aerospace Defense Command as a teenager. He denied ever having done so.

    Mitnick’s restless curiosity caught up with him when he was arrested for stealing $1 million in proprietary software from Digital Equipment Corporation in 1988. Mitnick was sentenced to a year in prison and three years of probation, but a new arrest warrant was issued in 1995 for violating that probation. Mitnick went on the run, breaking into the computer systems of multiple corporations, cell phone companies, and educational institutions, according to the federal indictment against him.

    Through it all, Mitnick and his defenders insisted he was harmless, not actually trying to hurt anyone or pursue financial gain.

    “I was an old-school hacker, doing it for intellectual curiosity,” Mitnick told Wired magazine in a 2008 interview. But federal authorities were so concerned about his capabilities that when he was incarcerated again in 1995, Mitnick told CNN he was held in solitary confinement for a time out of concern that even proximity to a telephone could allow him to continue hacking.

    Mitnick and federal prosecutors agreed to a plea deal in 1999 to seven criminal counts, including wire fraud and causing damage to computers. The deal included a 46-month prison sentence and a ban on being “employed in any capacity wherein he has access to computers or computer-related equipment or software” during a period of probation, but he was released in 2000 due to credit for time already served.

    Mitnick published a memoir on his hacking career, “Ghost in the Wires: My Adventures as the World’s Most Wanted Hacker,” in 2011.

    Following his prison term, Mitnick became a white-hat hacker, using his expertise to legally help businesses track people trying to break into their systems. For the past decade, he was the chief hacking officer and partial owner of the tech security firm KnowBe4, founded by his close friend and business partner, Stu Sjouwerman.

    “I made some really stupid mistakes in the past as a younger man that I regret,” Mitnick told CNN in a 2005 interview. “I’m lucky that I’ve been given a second chance and that I could use these skills to help the community.”

    “Kevin was a dear friend to me and many of us here at KnowBe4,” Sjouwerman said in a statement. “He is truly a luminary in the development of the cybersecurity industry, but mostly, Kevin was just a wonderful human being and he will be dearly missed.”

    A memorial for Mitnick is scheduled for August 1 in Las Vegas, his company said. He is survived by his wife Kimberley, who is pregnant with their first child, the family said.

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  • Asian Americans are anxious about hate crimes. TikTok ban rhetoric isn’t helping | CNN Business

    Asian Americans are anxious about hate crimes. TikTok ban rhetoric isn’t helping | CNN Business

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    CNN
     — 

    Ellen Min doesn’t go to the grocery store anymore. She avoids bars and going out to eat with her friends; festivals and community events are out, too. This year, she opted not to take her kids to the local St. Patrick’s Day parade.

    Min isn’t a shut-in. She’s just a Korean American from central Pennsylvania.

    Ever since the US government shot down a Chinese spy balloon last month, Min has withdrawn from her normal routine out of a concern she or her family may become targeted in one of the hundreds of anti-Asian hate crimes the FBI now says are occurring every year. The wave of anti-Asian hate that surged with the pandemic may only get worse, Min worries, as both political parties have amplified fears about China and the threat it poses to US economic and national security.

    “You can’t avoid paying attention to the rhetoric, because it has a direct impact on our lives,” Min said.

    That rhetoric surged again this week as a hostile House committee grilled TikTok CEO Shou Chew for more than five hours on Thursday about the app’s ties to China through its parent company, ByteDance. After lawmakers repeatedly accused Chew, who is Singaporean, of working for the Chinese government and tried to associate him with the Chinese Communist Party, Vanessa Pappas, a top TikTok executive, condemned the hearing as “rooted in xenophobia.”

    Chew had taken pains to distance TikTok from China, going so far as to anglicize his name for American audiences and to play up his academic credentials — he holds degrees from University College London and Harvard Business School. But it was not enough to prevent lawmakers from blasting TikTok as “a weapon of the Chinese Communist Party” and as “the spy in Americans’ pockets,” all while mangling pronunciations of Chew’s name and the names of other officials at its parent company, ByteDance. After Chew’s testimony, Arkansas Republican Sen. Tom Cotton said the CEO should be “deported immediately” and banned from the United States, saying his defense of TikTok was “beneath contempt.”

    There are good reasons to be mistrustful of ByteDance given that it is subject to China’s extremely broad surveillance laws. (TikTok has failed to assuage concerns the Chinese government could pressure ByteDance to improperly access the data, despite a plan by TikTok to “firewall” the information.) And the Chinese government’s authoritarian approach to numerous other issues clashes with important American values, said many Asian Americans interviewed for this article.

    But they also warned that policymakers’ choice to use inflammatory speech — in some cases, language tinged with 1950s-era, Red Scare-style McCarthyism — endangers countless innocent Americans by association. Moreover, politicians’ increasingly strident tone is creating conditions for new discriminatory policies at home and the potential for even more anti-Asian violence, civil rights leaders said.

    “We are afraid that, more and more, the actions and the language of the government is premised on the assumption that just because we are Chinese or have cultural ties to China that we could be disloyal, or be spies, or be under the influence of a foreign government,” said Zhengyu Huang, president of the Committee of 100, an organization co-founded by the late architect IM Pei, the musician Yo-Yo Ma and other prominent Chinese Americans. “We want to deliver the message: Not only are we not a national security liability — we are a national security asset.”

    But as the country wrestles with China’s influence as a competitive global power, caught in the middle are tens of millions of Americans like Min who, thanks to their appearance, may now face greater suspicion or hostility than they experienced even during the pandemic, according to Asian American lawmakers, civil society groups and ordinary citizens.

    The heated rhetoric surrounding China has undergone a shift from the pandemic’s early days, when xenophobia linked to Covid-19 was unambiguous.

    At the time, Asian Americans feared an uptick in violence inspired by derogatory phrases such as “Kung-flu” and “China virus.” That language had emerged amid then-President Donald Trump’s wider criticisms of China, which had led to a damaging trade war with the country. It was against that backdrop that Trump first threatened to ban TikTok, a move some critics said was an attempt to stoke xenophobia.

    In recent years, criticism of China has significantly expanded to encompass even more aspects of the US-China relationship. Concerns about China have gone mainstream as US national security officials and lawmakers have publicly grappled with state-backed ransomware attacks and other hacking attempts. The Biden administration has sought to confront China on how the internet should be governed, and like the Trump administration, it’s now taking aim at TikTok, again.

    As that shift has occurred, criticism of China has stylistically evolved from blatant name-calling to the more clinical vocabulary of national security, allowing an undercurrent of xenophobia to lurk beneath the respectable veneer of geopolitics, civil rights leaders said.

    People rallied during a

    In January, House lawmakers stood up a new select committee specifically focused on the “strategic competition between the United States and the Chinese Communist Party.” At its first hearing, the panel’s chairman, Wisconsin Republican Rep. Mike Gallagher, said: “This is an existential struggle over what life will look like in the 21st century — and the most fundamental freedoms are at stake.”

    A week later, US intelligence officials warned that the Chinese Communist Party represents the “most consequential threat” to US global leadership. An unclassified intelligence community report released the same day said China views competition with the United States as an “epochal geopolitical shift.” (Even so, the report maintained that the “most lethal threat to US persons and interests” continues to be racially motivated extremism and violence, particularly by White supremacy groups.)

    While some policymakers have added that their issue is with the Chinese government, not the Chinese people or Asians in general, leaders of Asian descent say the caveat has too often been a footnote in debates about China and not emphasized nearly enough. Leaving it unsaid or merely implied creates room for listeners to draw bigoted conclusions, critics said.

    “That can’t be a footnote; it can’t be an afterthought,” said Charles Jung, a California employment attorney and the national coordinator for Always With Us, a nationwide memorial event to remember the 2021 Atlanta spa shootings that killed six Asian women. “I’m speaking specifically, directly to both GOP and Democratic politicians: Be mindful of the words that you use. Because the words you use can have real world impacts on the bodies of Asian American people on the streets.”

    The current climate has led to at least one US lawmaker directly questioning the loyalty of a fellow member of Congress.

    California Democratic Rep. Judy Chu, who was born in Los Angeles and is the first Chinese American elected to Congress, last month confronted baseless claims of her disloyalty from Texas Republican Rep. Lance Gooden. Gooden’s remarks were swiftly condemned by his congressional colleagues. But to Chu, the incident was an example of the way politics surrounding China, technology and national security have fueled anti-Asian sentiment.

    “Rising tensions with China have clearly led to an increase in anti-Asian xenophobia that has real consequences for our communities,” Chu told CNN.

    Concerns about xenophobia are bipartisan. Rep. Young Kim, a California Republican, told CNN there is “no question” that anti-Asian hate crimes have risen since the pandemic.

    California Democratic Rep. Judy Chu, who was born in Los Angeles and is the first Chinese American elected to Congress, last month confronted baseless claims of her disloyalty from Texas Republican Rep. Lance Gooden.

    “This is unacceptable,” said Kim. “Asian American issues are American issues, and all Americans deserve to be treated with respect. We can treat all Americans with respect and still be wary of threats posed by the Chinese Communist Party.”

    But even in discussing the Chinese government’s real, demonstrated risks to US security, the way that some Americans describe those dangers is counterproductive, needlessly provocative and historically inaccurate, said Rep. Andy Kim, a New York Democrat and a member of the House select committee. Even the name “Chinese Communist Party” can itself prime listeners to adopt a Cold War mentality — a framework whose analytical value is dubious, Kim argued.

    “A lot of my colleagues, especially on the select committee, use rhetoric like, ‘This is a new Cold War,’” said Kim. “First of all, it’s not true: The Soviet Union was a very different competitor than China. And it’s framed in a very zero-sum way … It’s very much being talked about as if their entire way of life is incompatible with ours and cannot coexist with ours, and that heightens the tension.”

    In a November op-ed, Gallagher and Florida Republican Sen. Marco Rubio directly linked that rhetoric to TikTok, calling for the app to be banned due to the United States being “locked in a new Cold War with the Chinese Communist Party, one that senior military advisers warn could turn hot over Taiwan at any time.”

    Just because China may view its dynamic with the United States as an epic struggle does not mean Americans must be goaded into doing the same, Kim argued. Beyond the violence it could trigger domestically, a stark confrontational framing could cause the United States to blunder into poor policy choices.

    For example, he said, the right mindset could mean the difference between legally fraught “whack-a-mole” attempts to ban Chinese-affiliated social media companies versus passing a historic national privacy law that safeguards Americans’ data from all prying eyes, no matter what tech company may be collecting it.

    Security researchers who have examined TikTok’s app say that the company’s invasive collection of user data is more of an indictment of lax government policies on privacy, rather than a reflection of any TikTok-specific wrongdoing or national security risk.

    “TikTok is only a product of the entire surveillance capitalism economy,” said Pellaeon Lin, a Taiwan-based researcher at the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab. “Governments should try to better protect user information, instead of focusing on one particular app without good evidence.”

    Asked how he would advise policymakers to look at TikTok, Lin said: “What I would call for is more evidence-based policy.” Instead, some policymakers appear to have run in the opposite direction.

    Anti-China sentiment has already led to policies that risk violating Asian-Americans’ constitutional rights, several civil society groups said.

    John Yang, president of Asian Americans Advancing Justice, pointed to the Justice Department’s now-shuttered “China Initiative,” a Trump-era program intended to hunt down Chinese spies but that produced a string of discrimination complaints and case dismissals involving innocent Americans swept up in the dragnet. The Biden administration shut down the program last year.

    More recently, Yang said, proposed laws in Texas and Virginia aimed at keeping US land out of the hands of those with foreign ties would create impossible-to-satisfy tests for Asian-Americans, showing how anti-China fervor threatens to infringe on the rights of many US citizens.

    “National security has often been used as a pretext specifically against Asian-Americans,” Yang said, referring to the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II and the racial profiling of Muslim-Americans following Sept. 11. “We should remember that many Chinese-Americans came to this country to escape the authoritarian regime of China.”

    16 TikTok app STOCK

    Though he fears the situation for Asian-Americans will get worse before it gets better, Yang and other advocates called for US policymakers to stress from the outset that their quarrel lies with the Chinese government and not with people of Chinese descent.

    “We know from experience in the United States that once you demonize Chinese people, all Asian people living in this country face the brunt of that rhetoric,” said Jung. “And you see it not just in spy balloons and the reactions surrounding it and TikTok and Huawei, but also in modern-day racist alien land laws.”

    Growing up in Pennsylvania, Min was no stranger to racially motivated violence: Her home was regularly vandalized with eggs, tomatoes and epithet-laden graffiti (“Go home, gooks”); her father once discovered a crude homemade explosive stuffed in his car.

    But fears of racism stoked by modern US political rhetoric has forced Min to change how her family lives in ways they never had to during her childhood.

    Last year, amid another spate of assaults targeting elderly Asian-Americans, Min said her mother sold the family dry-cleaning business and moved to Korea, following Min’s father who had moved the year before.

    “It was a sad reality to say that as much as we want our family close to us and their grandchildren, they will be safer in Korea,” Min said.

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  • How Uber left Lyft in the dust | CNN Business

    How Uber left Lyft in the dust | CNN Business

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    CNN
     — 

    For years, Lyft positioned itself as the “nice guy” in the ride-hailing industry. It let rival Uber do most of the dirty work fighting regulators and the taxi industry to create a path for a new crop of companies to offer rides to customers through an app.

    In the process, Lyft cultivated a feel-good brand – but Uber dominated the market. For a brief moment in 2017, however, it looked like the balance of power might shift, as Uber was rocked by a seemingly endless series of PR crises that culminated with its founder and CEO Travis Kalanick stepping down.

    Six years later, however, Lyft’s position is arguably more precarious than it has ever been. Uber now has 74% of the US rideshare market, up from 62% in 2020, according to market research firm YipitData, while Lyft’s market share slipped to 26% from 38% during that same period. Meanwhile, Lyft stock has plunged nearly 90% since it went public in 2019.

    In a nod to those challenges, Lyft announced Monday that its two cofounders, Logan Green and John Zimmer, would step back from their management roles and the company would bring in Amazon veteran and Lyft board member David Risher to take the helm of Lyft as CEO.

    In its announcement, Lyft framed the leadership change as a straightforward succession plan. “All founders eventually find the right moment to step back and the right leaders to take their company forward,” Green said in a statement. “As a member of the board, he knows both the challenges and opportunities ahead.”

    For Lyft, the current challenges are immense. While Uber diversified its business beyond ride-hailing by delivering meals and grocery items, Lyft never did. That arguably hurt the company earlier in the pandemic when fewer customers were traveling but more were ordering items online. Late last year, Lyft said it was cutting 13% of its staff, or 700 employees, as part of a major effort to cut costs.

    At the same time, Lyft now faces an Uber that is run by a seasoned executive, Expedia veteran Dara Khosrowshahi, who immediately got to work straightening up the company’s business and image. Under Khosrowshahi, Uber doubled down on growing its meal delivery business, while working to cut costs elsewhere, including by selling off more experimental efforts like its self-driving car unit.

    In its most recent earnings report last month, Uber said that it had its “strongest quarter ever,” reporting a 49% year-over-year increase in revenue. Lyft’s latest earnings report, meanwhile, was unusually disappointing for Wall Street.

    One tech analyst, Dan Ives of Wedbush Securities, said Lyft’s conference call to discuss the results “was a Top 3 worst call we have ever heard” as its “management is trying to play darts blindfolded.” He slammed the earnings outlook offered on the call as a “debacle for the ages.”

    With Risher as the new CEO, Lyft is clearly hoping for a turnaround. Risher was the 37th employee of Amazon – a company that has long been the model for the on-demand industry – and he went on to become the e-commerce giant’s first head of product and head of US retail. In its statement announcing Risher as the new CEO, Lyft pointed to his legacy at Amazon: “In tribute to Mr. Risher’s contributions, Jeff Bezos added a permanent thank-you to the Amazon website, where it can still be seen  today.”

    Tom White, a senior research analyst at D.A. Davidson, wrote in a note this week that the new CEO “could signal an increased willingness to broaden the strategic aperture at  LYFT a bit as it relates to areas like product strategy (delivery), partnerships, or other novel ways to create value.”

    Former Uber CEO Travis Kalanick (left); current Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi (right).

    Nicholas Cauley, an analyst at research firm Third Bridge, wrote that Lyft “still has many levers it can pull to regain market share.” He added: “There are still improvements to be made and a leadership change is a positive catalyst for turning the ship around.”

    But in an interview with CNN’s Julia Chatterley on Wednesday, Risher seemed to dash hopes that Lyft would borrow from Uber’s playbook and branch into other delivery categories.

    Risher told CNN he wants to make sure Lyft focuses on providing a great ride-hailing service and “not get distracted by delivering pizzas or packages or all sorts of other things that other companies are doing.”

    “I don’t really want to get in the same car that, you know, just delivered the tuna sandwich,” he added. “And if you talk to drivers, they say, ‘Gosh, I don’t make as much in food delivery and it’s more frustrating. I get tickets when I’m double parked in front of the restaurant and so forth.’ So, you know, I think that, that Uber has its challenges too. I really do.”

    Risher also said “it’s not our focus” to pursue a sale of the company.

    While the market initially seemed to welcome Risher’s appointment, the slight uptick in Lyft stock after the news came out was quickly wiped out a day later once Risher started talking about his plans for the company.

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  • 2024 Presidential Candidates Fast Facts | CNN Politics

    2024 Presidential Candidates Fast Facts | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    Here’s a look at the 2024 presidential candidates and key dates in their campaigns.

    Republican Candidates

    Donald Trump – 45th president of the United States
    Primary Campaign Committee – Donald J. Trump for President 2024, Inc.
    Website – https://www.donaldjtrump.com/
    November 15, 2022 – Trump announces that he will seek the Republican presidential nomination in 2024, aiming to become only the second commander-in-chief ever elected to two nonconsecutive terms.

    Nikki Haley – Former governor of South Carolina and former US ambassador to the United Nations
    Primary Campaign Committee – Nikki Haley for President Inc.
    Website – https://nikkihaley.com/
    February 14, 2023 – Haley announces in a video that she will run for president in 2024.

    Vivek Ramaswamy – Entrepreneur and author
    Primary Campaign Committee – VIVEK 2024
    Website – https://www.vivek2024.com/
    February 21, 2023 – Ramaswamy announces that he’s running for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination.

    Asa Hutchinson – Former governor of Arkansas
    Primary Campaign Committee – America Strong and Free
    Website – https://www.asfpac.com/
    April 2, 2023 – Hutchinson announces that he’s running for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination during an interview on ABC News.

    Democratic Candidates

    Marianne Williamson – Author and activist
    Primary Campaign Committee – Marianne Williamson for President
    Website – https://www.marianne2024.com
    March 4, 2023 – Williamson formally announces that she’s running for president in 2024, her second bid for the White House following an unsuccessful campaign in 2020.

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  • Apple’s Weather app briefly went down and rained on everyone’s morning | CNN Business

    Apple’s Weather app briefly went down and rained on everyone’s morning | CNN Business

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    New York
    CNN
     — 

    Anyone using their iPhone to check the weather on Tuesday may have had better luck just looking out the window.

    Apple’s default Weather app briefly went down for many users on Tuesday morning, showing blank screens with no data. The result: many users felt clueless about what was happening outside.

    “The Apple Weather app has been down all morning and I never imagined how much disruption that would cause,” wrote one Twitter user. Another tweeted an apparent “Top Gun” reference: “Biggest storm of the season is about to hit Fargo and the Apple weather app is down. I’m flying blind, Goose.”

    There are numerous other sources one could use to determine the weather, including various apps, websites, local news reports and, of course, one’s own eyes. But the apparent disruption from the outage highlights how reliant some have grown on certain popular applications.

    Apple confirmed the outage in a Twitter reply to a frustrated user, noting that some app users may be experiencing a “temporary outage.” The company’s

    System Status page     also flagged the Weather app as facing an ongoing issue.

    Apple did not immediately respond to CNN’s request for comment.

    One CNN reporter saw only a handful of cities on the Weather app home screen load with full data, while most cities remained completely blank. The app usually displays information including hourly forecast, 10-day forecast, air quality index, precipitation, UV index and more.

    The app was revamped as part of the iOS 16 release in September after Apple bought popular weather service Dark Sky in 2020 and fully integrated its features into the newest operating system.

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  • There aren’t enough facilities to treat all kids hooked on opioids | CNN Politics

    There aren’t enough facilities to treat all kids hooked on opioids | CNN Politics

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    A version of this story appears in CNN’s What Matters newsletter. To get it in your inbox, sign up for free here.



    CNN
     — 

    After writing several previous newsletters on the stunning rise in opioid overdoses in the US, including among adolescents, I thought it was worth taking a look at what happens after an overdose, particularly for adolescents.

    I talked to Dr. Sivabalaji Kaliamurthy about what he’s encountering. A child and adolescent addiction psychiatrist who is board certified in general psychiatry, child psychiatry and addiction psychiatry, Kaliamurthy is also the director of the addiction clinic at Children’s National Hospital in Washington, DC.

    He told me that his clinic, which he set up in early 2022, has gone from getting one or two opioid use referrals per month to eight or more per month now, a year later.

    He particularly wanted to discuss some major news: The opioid overdose antidote naloxone, sold as Narcan, got approval from the US Food and Drug Administration on March 29, the day we talked, to be sold over the counter.

    Excerpts from our conversation, edited for flow, are below.

    WOLF: What is your reaction to Narcan being available over the counter?

    KALIAMURTHY: When I do an evaluation (of a patient), regardless of the substance use, you’re always talking about naloxone, brand name Narcan. …

    The message that I present parents with is always that it’s kind of like having a fire extinguisher at home. You hope you never need to use it, but you’re glad that you have it if you need to use it.

    Access is important. There are some controversies around increasing access to naloxone and fears that this may encourage more substance use. We have scientific research looking into this very specific question.

    And overall, there’s one study that came out this month that found that across 44 states where they increased access to naloxone for adolescents, it did not increase the rates of substance use in this population. And in some states, it actually decreased opioid use among adolescents. …

    The FDA approved the over-the-counter sale of naloxone, specifically the brand Narcan, because of how easily it can be administered. Naloxone also comes in other formulations, like injections, but Narcan is a nasal spray. We’re hoping that it will be out later this summer.

    The challenge remains how much is it going to cost? On average, it can cost anywhere between $50 to $100 right now. If it becomes over-the-counter, we don’t want insurances to stop covering [it].

    It will be interesting to see how the manufacturer goes about introducing it over the counter.

    WOLF: You said it’s like a fire extinguisher. Should everybody have it, or just people whose kids have demonstrated addictive behavior?

    KALIAMURTHY: Everyone should have it. Naloxone is not a treatment; it is more of an antidote. It reverses opioid overdoses, and the person who has the opioid overdose is never the one who’s going to use it somewhere in the community.

    WOLF: I’ve reported on a surge in overdoses. What are you seeing at Children’s?

    KALIAMURTHY: We are seeing an increase in the number of kids presenting to the hospital after experiencing an opioid overdose, and in general, opioid overdose deaths in the DMV (Washington, DC, Maryland, Virginia) region have significantly increased in the last two years. That aligns with a national trend we are seeing with regards to opioid overdoses.

    WOLF: Is there a profile for who these kids are? Do they share any traits?

    KALIAMURTHY: Yes. Let me talk about the kids we do see for opioid-related concerns first.

    At Children’s National, children often present after experiencing an overdose or having a medical complication because of using these M30, or the fake Percocet pills. We’ve had kids come in following conditions such as preliminary hemorrhage, where they were bleeding into their lungs, and overdose is not the only concern.

    Apart from that, we also have had kids presenting actively using these pills. They haven’t overdosed yet but they’re asking for help to stop using these pills.

    Some things that we have noticed, and this is the trend across the DMV region … the kids who are presenting to treatment, these are kids who are motivated to stop – they predominantly identify as Hispanic in ethnicity. Most of them have Medicaid for insurance.

    A lot of them, you know, they come to us – the average age is about 16, 16½ and their first use of opioids, these pills, was about a year ago. So the average first use was about 15 to 15½ years of age. They are really struggling, and they want to get better.

    KALIAMURTHY: Another common trait: cannabis use is quite common in this population. Pretty much every patient that I’ve come across started off around age 12 using cannabis products. This includes the flower and bud, vapes or edibles. Soon they transition to using the M30 pills.

    There are various different reasons, one of which is just access. A lot of other kids are using it. They’re using it in schools. They try it, they like it, and then it escalates and they stop using other substances.

    Most of these kids start off with crushing and try it nasally by snorting it and then they transition to smoking. What they do is they put these pills on a piece of aluminum foil, heat it up and inhale the fumes that come up. We haven’t had anyone come in who reported using any of these pills intravenously.

    WOLF: How is treatment for adolescents different than treating adult users who are seeking help?

    KALIAMURTHY: We have to take into consideration their developmental age and the psychological development that’s happening in adolescence, which is very different from adults.

    Oftentimes, this is the first point of entry into opioid use for these kids. Fentanyl, which is one of the most powerful opioids of abuse out there, is the first point of entry into opioid use for these children.

    Where for adults, they might have been prescribed pain medications. Or they might have started on opioids through other routes and might have used less potent products before transitioning to fentanyl.

    KALIAMURTHY: Historically, adolescents were not always the most motivated to seek treatment for substance use. What we would see was they would start off with experimenting, there would be a problem, it would take a few years and they’re adults by the time they’ve entered treatment and they’re trying different things to treat themselves before they enter treatment.

    With adolescents, now we are seeing that they can tell that they need help, and they are motivated and they are entering treatment.

    We have to take into account the presence of parents or guardians, how the school system interacts with them, what else do they do in their communities. There’s an increased association of violence and legal trouble that some of these patients end up in that we need to address while treating them. And these are some differences when it comes to treating adolescents versus adults.

    WOLF: One local community’s opioid response coordinator stressed to me that lack of availability of treatment is a real problem. Is that something that you agree with?

    KALIAMURTHY: Absolutely. That is a real problem at this point, because there is a huge discrepancy between the number of kids who need treatment and the available resources.

    The challenge is we can limit access and prevent these kids from getting the pills. But then you have a huge population of kids who are dependent on these pills, who can’t tolerate withdrawal symptoms, who have what we call opioid use disorder. That is going to perpetuate the problem if we’re not treating them. We need to do more in terms of increasing access to care for these kids.

    WOLF: Can you illustrate that capacity issue for me, through numbers or data? Or is it more anecdotal?

    KALIAMURTHY: Treatment is across different realms.

    For example, when a child is using these pills, and they have a problem with substance use, they need to go and be evaluated by a professional who has expertise in both addressing and evaluating mental health and addiction problems. And we don’t have very many people being able to do that.

    KALIAMURTHY: The first-time response is usually a counselor or social worker, sometimes physicians.

    But generally, there’s very little expertise in the pediatric health space with regards to addressing substance use-related problems. Screening is the point of entry.

    KALIAMURTHY: Then, say they need detox beds. Once they’ve entered treatment, we want to help them get through those initial days when their body is kind of adjusting to not using these pills, and we refer to that as detox.

    At Children’s National Hospital, when the kids come to the emergency room, we are not able to admit them for detoxes all the time. Sometimes we do end up admitting them.

    This depends on the availability of beds. The number of pediatric beds is very small to begin with. And beds may not always be available when somebody presents to the emergency room detox.

    And then there’s who is on call? Who’s available to treat these kids? I spoke about the lack of expertise in general, across the pediatric health space, so all that will determine whether a child is able to get access to detox services.

    That’s the detox part of treatment, which can be anywhere between two to five days.

    Detox doesn’t always mean somebody needs to be admitted. I also do outpatient detox where we are helping kids stop by providing them with medications and guiding their parents or guardians and the child on how to go through detox.

    KALIAMURTHY: Once you go through detox, depending on the extent of the problem, a child may require admission to a rehabilitation facility for anywhere between a month to six months.

    When we look at the number of facilities in the DMV region that provide this kind of rehab, I don’t think Virginia has any, DC doesn’t have any, Maryland has two. One is Sandstone Treatment Center, which is a private institution. The other is a treatment center, which is closer to Baltimore. There’s a limitation on who they can take.

    WOLF: Let me interrupt you. In a region that has millions of people, there are only two facilities that will take adolescents for one to six months’ treatment for substance use?

    KALIAMURTHY: Yes. For substance use.

    WOLF: Is that just a function of there’s more demand for those kinds of facilities among older people who are more likely to face addiction problems? Is that something the system is pivoting to address right now?

    KALIAMURTHY: It’s unclear. The system wants to help, but the challenge is historically adolescents are not always the most eager and motivated to get help.

    When we look at treatment programs, that didn’t exist in the past. They often relied on the judicial system, where some of these kids might have been mandated to treatment.

    Now we know that substance use disorders are chronic disorders and mandates don’t always work. Courts have stopped mandating treatment, because it’s like you mandate it for a month and then they come out and then what happens? There’s a lot of issues with mandating treatment.

    Now, most of the programs that were present prior to the pandemic also shut down during the pandemic because the needs also declined.

    This is not financially lucrative. That’s one reason why they’re having a huge issue with finding systems and having the county or the state take over with regards to creating the system.

    WOLF: I cut you off there. You were moving from the one-to-six-month facility to the next step in the process.

    KALIAMURTHY: So the next step is really engaging these kids in treatment. Not all kids require one to six months. Some kids might be OK with just completing detox and engaging in regular outpatient level of care. This might involve what we call intensive outpatient combined with medication.

    Which is where I would come in. A lot of what I do is provide medications for addiction treatment. These medications, the first part is for the detox to help with the child’s symptoms, but once you go through withdrawals, you can still have significant cravings to go back to using.

    The challenge, again, is the number of facilities. There are more options for intensive outpatient, but again, they are packed. The wait times to get in are longer now, and some of them are just virtual-only options, which may be good for some kids, but some kids might need more inpatient help.

    KALIAMURTHY: After this step, we have regular outpatient therapy and recovery support services, which is also lacking.

    The recovery support services are services which help kids get back on track academically. Catch up with your credit, get up on your grades and form a healthy, functioning resume. Get help finding part-time jobs. Keep these kids engaged in activities outside of school so that they are less likely to go back to the path that they were on which led to the substance use.

    WOLF: What’s your message to parents who are trying to keep an eye on their kids?

    KALIAMURTHY: Let’s look at the national-level data that we have collected up to 2021. Substance use is actually on the decline.

    Which is interesting because what is happening is that even though substance use among kids is on the decline – that’s both in middle school and high school – the substances that kids are using have become so much more potent.

    Take cannabis, which if you measure the potency by the percentage of THC content, has gone up significantly. The average THC percentage in the ’60s and ‘70s was like 2-5%. And now it’s like 20-25%. And kids are more likely to use what they call the concentrates, which is like 80% or more THC.

    When I talk to parents, the first thing I’m telling them about is the landscape of different substances that are out there, and kids are more likely to start off with cannabis or alcohol before they transition to the M30 pills.

    KALIAMURTHY: If you think about modifiable and non-modifiable risks, some risks just cannot be changed. These are things like genetics, family history and also if a child has a history of any traumatic experiences. Those are not things you can necessarily change. There are modifiable risk factors, like if a child has ADHD, they’re more likely to be at risk for developing substance use problems.

    If there are untreated mental health conditions, such as depression, anxiety, they’re more likely to have problems. We know that. The kids who identify as LGBTQ+, they also tend to have more risk factors in terms of initiating substances that transition into a problem.

    But also, we need to rethink how families address substances in the household. Kids learn by modeling they see from adults in their life and also the direct conversations we have. What are their values as a family around use of substances? These are not just legal and illegal – all substance use can have some harm. And early initiation is going to lead to more likelihood of having a problem.

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  • Americans hold mixed views on getting back to ‘normal’ after Covid-19, new polling shows | CNN Politics

    Americans hold mixed views on getting back to ‘normal’ after Covid-19, new polling shows | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    Three years after the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, Americans’ views of the disease’s impact have stagnated into a complex set of mixed feelings, recent polling suggests, with few believing that the pandemic has ended but most also saying that their lives had returned mostly – if not entirely – to normal.

    The US Senate passed a bill last week that would end the national Covid-19 emergency declared in March 2020. The US House approved the measure earlier this year, and the White House has said President Joe Biden will sign it despite “strongly” opposing the bill. The administration had already planned to wind down the emergency by May 11.

    In a recent Kaiser Family Foundation survey about the Biden administration’s original plan to end the public health emergency by May, 59% of Americans said they expected the decision to have no impact on them or their family, with the remainder about evenly split between the 20% who thought it would have a positive effect and the 21% who thought the impact would be negative.

    Only 24% of Americans personally feel that the pandemic is over, a recent Monmouth University poll found, with 20% saying it will end eventually and 53% saying that it’ll never be over. Those numbers were very similar to Monmouth’s polling last fall, suggesting that a sense of some lingering abnormalcy may well be the new normal.

    Relatively few Americans say either that their lives have completely returned to a pre-pandemic normal or that their lives are still completely upended by it. The Monmouth poll found a 69% majority saying that their daily routine was at least mostly back to what it was pre-pandemic – but only about a third, 34%, say that things were completely the same as they were three years ago. Another 20% said things were partially back to normal, and 11% that they were still not normal at all.

    Declaring to pollsters that the pandemic is over may be something of a political statement for ordinary Americans as well. Republicans were 17 points likelier than Democrats to say that their own routines were mostly back to normal, the Monmouth poll found, and 28 points likelier to say that the pandemic had completely ended.

    The results of the Monmouth survey echo a February Gallup poll that found 33% of Americans saying that their life was completely back to pre-pandemic normal, 20% saying that they expected it would eventually return to normal and nearly half that their life would never fully return to the way it was pre-pandemic. Gallup also found that views about the pandemic’s trajectory were nearly unchanged from their polling in October, when 31% thought normalcy had completely returned.

    “The 47% who don’t foresee a return to normalcy may be getting used to a ‘new normal’ that, for some, means occasional mask use, regular COVID-19 vaccines and avoidance of some situations that may put them at greater risk of infection, particularly at times when COVID-19 infections are spiking,” Gallup’s Megan Brenan wrote.

    About half of Americans, 48%, are continuing to mask up in public on at least some occasions, the Monmouth poll found, though only about 21% said they do so most or all of the time. In KFF polling from earlier this year, 46% of Americans said they’d taken some form of precautions – including mask-wearing or avoiding large gatherings, travel or indoor dining – over the winter due to news about the triple threat of Covid-19, the flu and RSV.

    In KFF’s latest poll, just over half the American public said they’d been boosted against Covid-19, but only 23% reported receiving the latest bivalent version of the booster vaccine.

    At the broader societal level, in a CNN poll last fall, more than 6 in 10 Americans said they believed the pandemic had permanently reshaped multiple aspects of the American landscape, from healthcare (66%) and education (63%) to the economy (61%) and the way most people do their jobs (69%).

    But while the public sees the pandemic’s effects as far-reaching and ongoing, they’re also not top of mind. In a Quinnipiac University survey released last week, fewer than 1% of Americans picked Covid-19 as “the most urgent issue facing the country.”

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  • Brittney Griner writing memoir on Russian detainment | CNN Politics

    Brittney Griner writing memoir on Russian detainment | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    Brittney Griner, the WNBA star who was freed from Russia late last year after being wrongfully detained, is writing a memoir due out next spring.

    “After an incredibly challenging 10 months in detainment, I am grateful to have been rescued and to be home. Readers will hear my story and understand why I’m so thankful for the outpouring of support from people across the world,” Griner said in a news release Tuesday from publisher Alfred A. Knopf.

    The two-time Olympic gold-medalist spent nearly 300 days in Russian custody after being detained in February 2022 and sentenced to nine years in prison under drug-smuggling charges after authorities in the country found cannabis oil in her luggage. Griner, who the US State Department deemed wrongfully detained, was released last December in a prisoner swap that involved Russian arms dealer Viktor Bout.

    Griner had for years played on a Russian women’s basketball team during the WNBA off-season and was detained in a Moscow airport as she traveled to rejoin the team.

    “That day was the beginning of an unfathomable period in my life which only now am I ready to share,” she said in the news release. “The primary reason I traveled back to Russia for work that day was because I wanted to make my wife, family, and teammates proud.”

    Her detainment spotlighted the salary caps WNBA players face in the US – which has pushed athletes to go overseas to earn more during their off-seasons.

    She will make her return to the WNBA next season after signing a one-year deal in February with the Phoenix Mercury.

    The book announcement comes after Russian authorities last month detained Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich, who the US State Department deemed wrongfully detained on Monday. Detained American Paul Whelan has also been held in Russian custody since 2018.

    “By writing this book, I also hope to raise awareness surrounding other Americans wrongfully detained abroad,” Griner said.

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  • Seagate to pay $300 million penalty for shipping Huawei hard drives in violation of US export control laws | CNN Business

    Seagate to pay $300 million penalty for shipping Huawei hard drives in violation of US export control laws | CNN Business

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    Reuters
     — 

    Seagate Technology has agreed to pay a $300 million penalty in a settlement with US authorities for shipping over $1.1 billion worth of hard disk drives to China’s Huawei in violation of US export control laws, the Department of Commerce said on Wednesday.

    Seagate

    (STX)     sold the drives to Huawei between August 2020 and September 2021 despite an August 2020 rule that restricted sales of certain foreign items made with US technology to the company. Huawei was placed on the Entity List, a US trade blacklist, in 2019 to reduce the sale of US goods to the company amid national security and foreign policy concerns.

    The penalty represents the latest in a string of actions by Washington to keep sophisticated technology from China that may support its military, enable human rights abuses or otherwise threaten US security.

    Seagate shipped 7.4 million drives to Huawei for about a year after the 2020 rule took effect and became Huawei’s sole supplier of hard drives, the Commerce Department said.

    The other two primary suppliers of hard drives ceased shipments to Huawei after the new rule took effect in 2020, the department said. Though they were not identified, Western Digital

    (WDC)     and Toshiba

    (TOSBF)     were the other two, the US Senate Commerce Committee said in a 2021 report on Seagate.

    The companies did not respond to requests for comment.

    Even after “its competitors had stopped selling to them … Seagate continued sending hard disk drives to Huawei,” Matthew Axelrod, assistant secretary for export enforcement at the Commerce Department’s Bureau of Industry and Security said in a statement. “Today’s action is the consequence.”

    Axelrod said the administrative penalty was the largest in the history of the agency not tied to a criminal case.

    Seagate’s position was that its foreign-made drives were not subject to US export control regulations, essentially because they were not the direct product of US equipment.

    “While we believed we complied with all relevant export control laws at the time we made the hard disk drive sales at issue, we determined that … settling this matter was the best course of action,” Seagate CEO Dave Mosley said in a statement.

    In an order issued on Wednesday, the government said Seagate wrongly interpreted the foreign product rule to require evaluation of only the last stage of its manufacturing process rather than the entire process.

    Seagate made drives in China, Northern Ireland, Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand and the United States, the order said, and used equipment, including testing equipment, subject to the rule.

    In August, the US Department of Commerce sent the company a “proposed charging letter,” warning the company that it may have violated export control laws. The letter kicked off some eight months of negotiations.

    Seagate’s $300 million penalty is due in installments of $15 million per quarter over five years, with the first payment due in October. It also agreed to three audits of its compliance program, and is subject to a five-year suspended order denying its export privileges.

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