Two Russians who said they fled the country to avoid compulsory military service have requested asylum in the U.S. after landing on a remote Alaskan island in the Bering Sea, according to information from Alaska U.S. Sen. Lisa Murkowski’s office
JUNEAU, Alaska — Two Russians who said they fled the country to avoid compulsory military service have requested asylum in the U.S. after landing on a remote Alaskan island in the Bering Sea, Alaska U.S. Sen. Lisa Murkowski’s office said Thursday.
Karina Borger, a spokesperson for Murkowski, said by email that the office has been in communication with the U.S. Coast Guard and Customs and Border Protection and that “the Russian nationals reported that they fled one of the coastal communities on the east coast of Russia to avoid compulsory military service.”
Spokespersons with the Coast Guard and Customs and Border Protection each referred a reporter’s questions to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, which did not immediately respond Thursday.
Alaska’s senators, Republicans Murkowski and Dan Sullivan, on Thursday said the individuals landed at a beach near Gambell, an isolated community of about 600 people on St. Lawrence Island. The statement doesn’t specify when the incident occurred though Sullivan said he was alerted to the matter by a “senior community leader from the Bering Strait region” on Tuesday morning.
A Sullivan spokesperson, Ben Dietderich, said it was the office’s understanding that the individuals had arrived by boat.
Gambell is about 200 miles (320 kilometers) southwest of the western Alaska hub community of Nome and about 36 miles (58 kilometers) from the Chukotka Peninsula, Siberia.
Third-party candidate Paula Overby, who was running in a competitive race for the congressional seat in Minnesota’s 2nd District, died Wednesday of heart complications, Overby’s son confirmed to WCCO CBS Minnesota.
WCCO reporter and anchor Esme Murphy was scheduled to interview Overby on Tuesday, Murphy said in a tweet, and after the Marijuana Legal Now candidate did not show up, Murphy was told Overby had been hospitalized.
(credit: Paula Overby)
Overby, who was running on the Legal Marijuana Now ticket died just about a month before the midterm elections. The office of Minnesota’s secretary of state of will not be postponing the election, and Overby’s name will remain on the ballot.
The Republican challenger in the race, Tyler Kistner, is pausing his events for the next two days, out of respect for Overby’s family. “This is a very sad day for Minnesota’s Second District,” Kistner said in a statement. “Paula Overby cared deeply about our state, and the principles she believed in. It was an honor to have gotten to know Paula throughout this campaign.”
In an odd coincidence, this is the second consecutive congressional election in which the Marijuana Legal Now candidate in Minnesota’s 2nd Congressional District died just before the general election. In September 2020, Adam Weeks died, apparently of an accidental fentanyl overdose. After his death, the The Star Tribune reported that before his death, Weeks had left a voicemail for a friend saying that Republicans had recruited him to run for the seat just to take votes from Democratic Rep. Angie Craig.
The 2nd District, which encompasses a suburb south of Minneapolis, is rated as a toss-up by Cook Political report..
The nation’s gross national debt has exceeded $31 trillion, according to a U.S. Treasury report released Tuesday that logs America’s daily finances.
Nearing the statutory ceiling of roughly $31.4 trillion — an artificial cap Congress placed on the U.S. government’s ability to borrow — the debt numbers are hitting an already tenuous economy facing the highest inflation in 40 years, rising interest rates and a strong U.S. dollar.
Even as President Joe Biden has touted his administration’s deficit reduction efforts this year and recently signed the so-called Inflation Reduction Act, which attempts to tame high price increases caused by a variety of economic factors, economists say the latest debt numbers are a reason for concern.
Owen Zidar, a Princeton economist, said rising interest rates will exacerbate the nation’s growing debt issues and make the debt itself more costly. The Federal Reserve has raised rates several times this year in an effort to combat inflation.
Zidar said the debt “should encourage us to consider some tax policies that almost passed through the legislative process but didn’t get enough support,” like imposing higher taxes on the wealthy and closing the carried interest loophole, which allows money managers to treat their income as capital gains.
“I think the point here is if you weren’t worried before about the debt before, you should be — and if you were worried before, you should be even more worried,” Zidar said.
The Congressional Budget Office earlier this year released a report on America’s debt load, warning in its 30-year outlook that, if unaddressed, the debt will soon spiral upward to new highs that could ultimately imperil the U.S. economy. If unchecked, investors could lose confidence in the U.S. government’s ability repay its debt, which would result in a spike in interest rates and rising inflation, the CBO warned.
And as interest rates rise — as they are now under the Federal Reserve’s regime of rate hikes — the U.S. will be forced to spend “substantially” more on interest payments, the CBO added. That could weaken the fiscal position of the U.S., it noted.
“Addicted to debt”
In its August Mid-Session Review, the administration forecasted that this year’s budget deficit will be nearly $400 billion lower than it estimated back in March, due in part to stronger than expected revenues, reduced spending and an economy that has recovered all the jobs lost during the multiyear pandemic.
In full, this year’s deficit will decline by $1.7 trillion, representing the single largest decline in the federal deficit in American history, the Office of Management and Budget said in August.
Maya MacGuineas, president of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget said in an emailed statement Tuesday, “This is a new record no one should be proud of.”
“In the past 18 months, we’ve witnessed inflation rise to a 40-year high, interest rates climbing in part to combat this inflation, and several budget-busting pieces of legislation and executive actions,” MacGuineas said. “We are addicted to debt.”
A representative from the Treasury Department was not immediately available for comment.
Sung Won Sohn, an economics professor at Loyola Marymount University, said “it took this nation 200 years to pile up its first trillion dollars in national debt, and since the pandemic we have been adding at the rate of 1 trillion nearly every quarter.”
Predicting high inflation for the “foreseeable future,” he said, “when you increase government spending and money supply, you will pay the price later.”
Twitter’s former security chief painted the social media company as a data-grabbing behemoth that risks exploitation by “teenagers, thieves and spies” in testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Tuesday.
“Twitter leadership is misleading the public, lawmakers, regulators and even its own board of directors,” Peiter Zatko said in his testimony.
“They don’t know what data they have, where it lives and where it came from, and so, unsurprisingly, they can’t protect it,” Zatko said. “It doesn’t matter who has keys if there are no locks on the doors.”
“A decade behind”
Zatko, who was Twitter’s security head from November 2020 to January 2022, when he was fired, first laid out his allegations in a whistleblower complaint last month.
On Tuesday, he said the company was “almost a decade behind cybersecurity standards.” Twitter users give up far more of their personal information than they — or sometimes even Twitter itself — realize, Zatko testified.
Engineers, who make up half of Twitter’s employees, can access personal data of any user, Zatko said, adding the company did not keep logs of activities that enable it to track who logged into its internal systems. Executives do not fully understand Twitter’s security issues and don’t have the incentives to fix them, Zatko said.
When it comes to federal regulation, the Federal Trade Commission “is in a little over their head,” Zatko said: “They’re left letting companies grade their own homework.”
Many of Zatko’s claims are uncorroborated and appear to have little documentary support. Twitter has denied his allegations.
“Today’s hearing only confirms that Mr. Zatko’s allegations are riddled with inconsistencies and inaccuracies,” a company spokesperson said in a statement.
Among Zatko’s most attention-grabbing assertions Tuesday was that Twitter knowingly allowed the government of India to place its agents on the company payroll, where they had access to highly sensitive data on users. Twitter’s inability to monitor how employees accessed user accounts made it hard for the company to detect abuses, Zatko said.
Zatko said that Twitter had at least one foreign agent from China on its payroll, and expressed “high confidence” that the Indian government had placed an agent at Twitter to “understand the negotiations” between the country’s ruling party and Twitter regarding new social media restrictions.
Zatko also said that Twitter’s advertising sales to Chinese companies, despite the service being banned in the country, raised concerns among some employees.
“Employees were disturbed that, in a country where the service was not allowed to be used, money was provided to organizations associated with the Chinese government,” he said, adding that Amazon executives overruled those concerns.
Zatko described similar concerns about Russia. He said he was “surprised and shocked” by an exchange with Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal in which the executive, who was chief technology officer at the time, asked if it would be possible to “punt” content moderation and surveillance to the Russian government, since Twitter lacks “the ability and tools to do things correctly.”
Zatko’s revelations offer additional ammunition to Tesla CEO Elon Musk, who is set to face Twitter in court after trying to back out of a $44 billion deal to buy the company. Musk has subpoenaed Zatko to testify at the trial, which is set to begin on October 17.
Separately on Tuesday, Twitter shareholders voted overwhelmingly to approve Musk’s acquisition, according to multiple media reports. Shareholders have been voting on the issue for weeks, although the vote was largely a formality, given the court case.
One issue that didn’t come up in the hearing was the question of whether Twitter is accurately counting its active users. One of Musk’s key contentions is that Twitter is lying about how many bots it has on the platform — an assertion that Zatko seemed to back up in his whistleblower complaint.
Sen. Dick Durbin, an Illinois Democrat who heads the Judiciary Committee, said the flaws Zatko described “may pose a direct threat to Twitter’s hundreds of millions of users as well as to American democracy.”
“Twitter is an immensely powerful platform and can’t afford gaping vulnerabilities,” Durbin said.
Zatko, 51, first gained prominence in the 1990s as a pioneer in the ethical hacking movement and later worked in senior positions at an elite Defense Department research unit and at Google. He joined Twitter in late 2020 at the urging of then-CEO Jack Dorsey.
